Robert's Rants

Linguistic Deficiencies

2012-01-15T07:49:00.000-05:00

I have heard or read several times during my life that the aboriginal peoples who inhabit Arctic regions use many different names to describe snow. When your survival depends on it, it must be very important to understand and describe to others all the different kinds of snow, fresh wet to powder dry, soft to icy hard. I wonder what it means that our modern urban culture has so many synonyms and slang terms to describe sexual relations and sex organs. I understand the interest in the topic, but why so many names. We also have a lot of ways to describe people for whom we have a low opinion: jerk, nitwit, moron, dope, nimcumpoop, and so on. Why do we seem to need so many names for stupid people or for what we cover up with underwear?

I think our culture needs special names for at least two forms of snow. I never know how to describe these forms, and they come up in conversation often enough that it would be convenient to have names for them.

The first is a form that inhabitants of northern climates who drive cars are familiar with. It is that clump of hardened sticky wet dirty icy snow that clings to the wheel wells or mud guards on our cars and trucks. People who have never lived in snowy areas may not know what I am talking about, so I have included a photo below. In the main, you can live your life ignoring this stuff, it eventually falls off, but if it doesn’t fall off on the way home, you have to clean or kick it off your car if you don’t want it melting in your garage overnight. That wet clump of melting snow, ice, road dirt, oil, salt, sand, is an awful thing to step in. As it melts it can get into all kinds of thing you were trying to keep dry. We need a name for that clump. The best that I have heard so far is “crut”, a variation of “crud” I think. The word has a lot going for it, it’s short, easy to spell and the sound of the word expresses both the nature of the substance and our feelings about it quite well. But maybe others have better candidates.

There is a second form of snow that is probably universally despised even more than the “crut” in our cars’ wheel wells. I am referring to the mound of packed road snow that snowplows leave across our driveways after they clean a street. Talking about what snowplows leave across our driveways is a favourite topic of conversation here in Canada after every snow storm. But we have no name for that mound, and it’s such a linguistic nuisance to keep calling it that “mound that the snowplow left”. Why don’t we have a name for this? I have included a picture of half a mound at the end of my driveway. I ran out of arm strength about halfway through shoveling yesterday.

Frankly, I am amazed that we here in Canadian cities put up with this. It’s bad enough having to clear the entire length of the driveway, but at least that’s freshly fallen clean snow, often just fluffy powder, but the “stuff that the snowplow leaves behind” is always dense, heavy, and usually deeper than what actually fell out of the sky. I find it incredible that we don’t insist that the road service crews clean away our driveway openings after plowing a street. Before amalgamation with Toronto, the City of North York provided exactly that service. A smaller plow, equipped with a swinging blade, followed the larger road plows around all day, and the operator dropped the blade long enough to clean off driveway entrances. Why would we do it any other way?

Fantasy Cars

2011-10-30T15:23:00.000-04:00

Having participated in grassroots motor sports for most of the last 20 years, I count a fair number of car nuts among my friends. It’s not surprising then that conversations and e-mail exchanges occasionally turn to cars and what exotic cars we’d permit ourselves if we won a lottery. Desires run the gamut, of course, but other people can write their own blog. I’ll just tell you what I would spend my money on if my ticket came in a winner.
First, I’d sell my ’08 Vibe. There’s nothing wrong with this car, nothing at all, but I have no feelings for it. The first thing I would do is replace it with a cheap “grocery-getter”, as a friend puts it. I’d put a limit of about $4000-$5000 on this purchase, any 4 to 5 year old small car would do, a Toyota Yaris, say, or Hyundai Accent maybe, something narrow and short that would not force me to clean out the garage to make room for it in winter. This is the kind of vehicle you need to get groceries, go to the dentist, stop by Dairy Queen, the usual daily routine. The only maintenance I would do on this car is to do oil changes and maybe service the brakes. The moment it needed anything else, I would trade it in immediately on the next grocery-getter.
This is extravagant, of course, maybe even obscenely so, but since I would have lottery winnings collecting some meagre interest in the bank, it’s an extravagance that I would permit myself. Besides, by making relatively good used vehicles frequently available to the second-hand market, it would be my small way of helping out those who need relatively reliable cars but who don’t have much money, e.g., students, people who have lost their jobs, penny-pinching cheapskates. I think of this as my small contribution to the redistribution of wealth, my own little Bill Gates moment.
But what I would also do with my winnings, automotive-wise anyway, is to become Hertz’ dream customer. You see, although I enjoy driving and enjoy testing different cars, I detest owning cars. I don’t enjoy having to worry about upkeep. I hate doing my own maintenance. Somehow, lying down on a cold garage floor trying to undo some damn bolt that’s seized into place and for which I don’t have the correct tool lost its appeal as I got older. If I didn’t have to, I would never do that again, and if I won a lottery, I could pretty much guarantee that I wouldn’t. I am also reluctant to have my cars maintained by others. It's not easy finding reliable technicians, and anyway they need appointments and that means planning for bus rides, pick-ups, etc., all things about car ownership I would not put up with it if I didn't have to.
For a guy like me, renting is ideal. I could drive a wide variety of cars and never worry about changing the timing-belt or spark plugs, or even washing the damn things for that matter. I'd never buy another windshield wiper or air filter. My local Canadian Tire store has been remodelled and now I can't find air filters on the shelf anymore, you have to wait at the parts counter and order one, so buying an air filter has been transformed from a 2-minute walk-by shopping experience, like picking up butter say, into a 15-minute wait in a place I don't want to be experience, one more aggravation to do with car ownership. As a result, I don't buy air filters there anymore.
Nowadays, rental companies have all sorts of interesting vehicles to rent. On a recent trip to Nova Scotia, we rented a Volvo S40 T5. There is no way I would ever buy a car that fancy, worrying about its upkeep would keep me up at night, but renting one for a week is a treat.
I would walk into Hertz outlets for miles around, and all the counter staff would know me by name. “Hi Rob”, they’d say, “Wanna try out a Lexus this week?” “Sure Jim”, I’d reply, “sounds like fun!” And now and then, Dave (I made this name up), the Regional Manager, would call me and offer a free upgrade to a "Premium" model for no extra charge, just because I was such a good customer. "Thanks, Dave", I'd say, "Can I pick it up Tuesday?". "No worries, Rob", he'd answer, "I'll have it delivered."
The reason I would choose Hertz, by the way, is because after 30 years of occasionally renting car during vacations or weekends away, they are the only rental company that have always had a car waiting for me when they said they would. I have tried nearly all the other car renters, and despite reserving cars well ahead of the appointed time, they have all, at least once, greeted with, "Sorry, we don't have any cars for you." I find it extraordinary that any of them are still in business, frankly, so screw them.
If I won a lottery, my fantasy would be to never own a car again, other than the cheap replaceable grocery-getter. Other lottery winners can buy themselves the BMWs or Lotuses of their dreams, bully for them, but my fantasy is to rent.

Two wheels good, four wheels better

2010-08-20T10:30:00.002-04:00

For some reason, North America does not seem to hold two-wheeled transportation in high regard, at least that’s how it seems to me. I think this applies to both human-powered and mechanized versions. This is quite at odds with the rest of the world, where bicycles, scooters, and motorcycles are used daily by millions of people for transportation. But in the main, in North America, they are considered playthings.

The other day I was stopped at a traffic light next to a guy on a motorcycle. He was dressed in office attire, his motorcycle had two hard-shelled saddlebags, a windscreen that extended up far enough to disrupt the worst of the wind, he sat nearly straight up on the frame, and the engine was very quiet. It idled quietly and pulled away quietly too. I couldn’t see any decals so I don’t know the engine size, but visually it appeared to be smaller than the usual motorbike I see around.

He looked like a reasonable guy with a quiet and comfortable commuter motorbike, and it occurred to me it was probably the first one I had seen in years. What I usually see on the roads around here are either great big loud Easy Rider wannabies with leather fringes and metal studs or young bucks hunched over testicle-crushing sport bikes with rear tires twice the size of the front ones. In other words, what I mostly see on the streets are toys.

Why does our culture marginalize and infantilize motorcycles and bicycles? It makes no sense. They are perfectly reasonable methods of transportation, especially so when compared with automobiles that usually have only one occupant. This applies to small scooters too. They are quite rare here in Ottawa, and what little advertisement I see for them seems aimed at their fashion cuteness or trendy colours that match your sunglass frames. So why can’t a 100 cc Vespa be a reasonable and adult mode of commuter vehicle.

I live in an Ottawa suburb and one of the crazy things I see out here are roadside bicycle lanes that are also used by city buses when they stop for passengers. The land that is allotted to curbs is immense, huge tracts of land that set off the nearest traffic lane from neighbourhood homes, streets so wide that it is dangerous for most humans to cross them at intersections, because it is difficult for many people to get across during the duration of one green-light cycle. So, predictably, there are hardly any pedestrians. All that land, but bicycles have to share the road with buses, while at the same time we have pedestrian sidewalks with almost no humans on them.

Lately, three-wheeled motorcycles are becoming popular. When I first saw one I thought they were a clever idea. With three wheels and a small motor, you would have a reasonable second vehicle for a household that could be used to fetch groceries, or go to the dentist or something. You could easily build a small useful cargo area on one. Instead, they are designed and marketed as sport “trikes” and cost well over $20,000. In other words, they are also toys.

I have nothing against toys. Everyone should own and enjoy toys, they make life fun. But somebody, somewhere, probably big name consultants, decided that people in North America don't want inexpensive lightweight personal transportation. They are probably the same consultants who nearly eliminated the hatchback from automotive showrooms, because, well, they decided we didn't want any. So for about a decade, the VW Golf was almost the only hatchback you could buy in Canada and the US, while the rest of the world was drowning in them. Then, about 10 years ago, they started selling hatchbacks again, and no surprise to me, people are buying a lot of them. I have never read any articles blaming those consultants for their previous folly.

So listen, you with the MBA, working in marketing for motorcycle, scooter, and bicycle manufacturers, stop listening to those idiot consultants your boss hired. They know nothing, their only interest is in stroking your CEO's ego to get more consulting contracts. They don't know a damn thing about what the average joe wants. They don't even know any average joes. Sell us some cheap useful bikes please.

Flowchart of Life

2010-06-13T08:08:00.003-04:00

Burn Baby Burn

2010-04-27T13:55:00.000-04:00

None of the big box hardware stores near me carry Hibachi barbecues anymore. It's the end of an era. Hibachis were inconvenient but inexpensive. Being made of heavy cast iron, they would last 3-4 years even though I neglected them completely. I would leave them outside all year long and only buy new grills when the old ones rusted. I never trusted putting the things on a pedestal so would have to crouch down to use them, and their cooking surface area was not very large. But the price was right, about $10 CDN or so for years, but the last one I bought in 2007 cost me $13 CDN. It’s still in the back yard, probably serviceable but it’s impossible to find grills that fit now.

I have tried buying the slightly more expensive round waist-high thin-metal charcoal barbecues, but I have never had one that lasted the summer. It takes one rainfall to start them rusting, and they go downhill quickly once that happens. I know, I know, if I protected them from the rain and cleaned them out regularly, they would last longer. But I will not do that. I don’t buy cheap $20 pieces of third-rate technology so I can spend my time maintaining them. To my mind, that would miss the entire point.

After cooking a meal, it takes a while for the charcoal to finish burning, and the barbecue is too hot to touch till the next day. By then, I am not thinking about the barbecue, I’m onto other things. If it starts to rain, I will not go outside and get wet just to save a $20 piece of cheap crap. I could buy a protective cover, but they can’t be used until the barbecue has cooled down, and by then I will have almost certainly forgotten about putting the protection on, and that plasticized cloth cover would end up being just another wasted purchase. I know I am not alone in this, because all my life I have been seeing rusted barbecues in people’s back yards and torn dilapidated protective covers cluttering up their tool sheds.

Now and then I look at the expensive propane and gas fired barbecues that are lined up for viewing at my local big box hardware store. I have noticed that their prices have been steadily increasing over the years. They now look like expensive sculpted appliances, which is what they are, of course. All that effort and money is spent on something that sits outside and is only used for 3-4 months of the year. I have tasted meat from those things, and it tastes as if it had been cooked indoors in the kitchen broiler. That’s no surprise, since that’s what they really are. With them, you don’t get that charcoal flavour, so why not just cook indoors and save yourself $500 and the expense of getting a gas hookup.

In television ads I see that you can buy entire sets of outdoor furniture to go along with the gas outdoor ranges. You can buy patio refrigerators and even outdoor sinks with hot and cold running water. Unless you live on a 40-acre estate so that your patio is 200 metres from the house, the majority of these outdoor “living areas” will be set up within 10-20 metres of perfectly good kitchens, dining rooms, and living rooms. And while the home owners and their guests are outside enjoying the redundant al fresco rooms and duplicate appliances, their indoor rooms are cooling in air conditioned comfort, empty.

Why recreate outside what you already have inside only to lose the charcoal taste in the process, which was the reason for the outdoor barbecue in the first place?

Try to open this

2010-04-22T10:41:00.001-04:00

They used to package music CDs in a hard plastic sheath that I could never open without using a heavy-duty cutting tool. I would sometimes stubbornly try to pry my fingernails into the crevice between the two layers of plastic and invariably hurt myself. I might get a small flap opened, hoping to rip the entire package open using the exposed lip, but it never worked.

CDs must not be worth much to anyone anymore because they no longer use that wrapping method. I still buy CDs though, and they now come in a lightweight cellophane-like material that can be opened by first prying with a pencil or pen, things that can be quickly found almost anywhere. I no longer have to fetch my metal shears from the garage. But they continue to wrap flash memory cards in that hard plastic, so I guess those items are considered more important than CDs now. At first, the cards were expensive, but not so much anymore. Memory cards have a smaller footprint than music CDs, and I guess it would be easy for a thief to pocket one in a store. I can understand putting them in a package of larger dimensions, but isn’t a cardboard box good enough? That’s how they package ink cartridges for printers and they aren’t cheap. I have bought my last few memory cards via the internet, however, and I really don’t see any reason to worry about shoplifting in a mail-order purchase.

I recently bought some inexpensive battery-powered hand fans, though, and they came in the hard plastic too. The things are bigger than music CDs and cost $10, so why the fuss?

That hard plastic used to drive me nuts. It teases the purchaser, because it appears that it was meant to be removed easily, but that’s not the case. There’s certainly no sticker on the packaging that tells you to have a cutting torch handy.

It turns out that the material designed to be difficult to open, on purpose. I heard an interview on CBC radio with someone from a packaging company that explained how the package is formed. The sheets of plastic are sonically welded together, that’s why the seal is so tough and why I can’t pry the packaging apart with my bare hands. The spokesman said that the material is designed to be cut apart with a medium-duty cutting tool.

Now he tells me.

I would like to meet the inventor of the process. I’d sit with him, offer him lots of very salty peanuts and get him drinking lots of beer, an entire case of 24 maybe. Any brand he likes. Then I’d put him on a small 10-foot square deserted island surrounded by video camcorders. I would put an outhouse on the island and I would wrap the outhouse in a sonically welded hard plastic package. Then I would film him trying to get into the outhouse, and I would watch the video over and over again, and laugh and laugh.

The Payoff

2010-03-01T12:25:00.001-05:00

It was inevitable and so it finally happened. I went into a store this morning and got my first seniors’ discount. The discount chain, Zellers’ gives 10% off to people 55 years of age and older on the first Monday of every month (I am 56 so am in fact a year late cashing in on this). I bought sunglasses, some chocolate, and replenished my underwear inventory, something that was much needed. To double-check, I asked the cashier, a 20-something woman, about the seniors’ discount and she said they call it the “55 advantage now” and leave out the “senior” part. Nice try, I thought, but I still know what it really means. Then I asked if she wanted to see my driver’s license, and she casually said no, which she almost certainly did not intend as an insult.

Sometime last week, I did a web search for seniors’ discounts and I was surprised how many clothing, hardware, and drug store chains offer them. It’s a little confusing because their discount days are all on different days of the week and at different times of the month. But sure enough, there are web sites that track all that for you, making it easier to plan purchases. Ten percent is not life-changing, but the money is better in my pocket than theirs.

On the way out of the store, I discreetly took a look round and saw lots of grey and white hair, but maybe that’s unfair, maybe that’s who shops at 11:00 a.m. on Mondays. I need reading glasses now, don’t play touch football anymore, and eat less fried food than I used to, but the payoff is that I can now get a deal on white cotton Stanfields.

Part of the Team

2009-09-09T21:57:00.002-04:00

In my professional life, I have been exposed from time to time to team building programs. I am referring to the kind of exercise that management puts into place to get the members of a work group to "bond" together. Maybe someone in charge reads in the business press about a company whose employees go mountain climbing together, or run marathons together, or operate soup kitchens in their spare time on weekends, and the writer of the story manages to get a quote from someone at that firm who claims that their financial success is closely tied to the familial intra-mural employee bonding that these outside activities provide. They quote homilies like "We're like a family", whatever that means in a culture with a 50% divorce rate. Management then thinks that they should get their own employees to do things together, and that wealth and success will soon follow.

The programs can take many forms. Innocuous ones are monthly gourmet lunch clubs, goofy once-a-year bowling nights, etc., but some can intrude into personal lives like weekend-long retreats or after hours social activities. When they conflict with personal lives, they can do a lot of damage to a team's spirit, the opposite of the original intent. If you are more or less forced to attend a pub night at which you have to listen to your colleagues talk about work at a time when you could think of at least 100 better things to do, you will not go into the office the next morning with a warm glow in your heart towards your boss or your cubicle comrades. Fortunately, the vast majority of these efforts die a mercifully quick natural death, but some linger. Group dynamics are complex. We don't understand how wolf packs and caribou herds work, so why do some think that they can manufacture a cohesive "team" by forcing people to spend time together when they have better things to do.

Sadly, five minute's worth of analysis is more time than you should need to see the utter stupidity of even attempting to do this. First, the reporter who wrote about the successful company with happy employees did not include the stories from the ten other companies he researched that were going bankrupt, despite having the happiest workforce since the twelve apostles. Nobody wants to read about that, and the reporter knows it so he left that part out. Second, since it was in the business press, it was probably a plant by the marketing department anyway. It's not real news just because it appears in print, you know. Third, when a reporter shows up a cubicle, do you think the employee tells the reporter the truth; he's not a priest, he's a reporter, and the employees are not all Catholic anyway.

A more odious form is when the "team building" is just a paternalistic cynical confidence game. I used to work in IT and in its early days, working in the field was cult-like. If you were weird, then you were smart and you were special, so went the thinking. Management allowed you to dress like a slob. You could eat Cheesies at your desk, and people egotistically thought that they were permitted these liberties because they were important. What utter nonsense, what self-delusion. Management let people behave that way because those smelly slobs were working 100 hours per week while only being paid for 40. If it made them feel good to think that they were on a mission, well, so much the better.

Eventually, that morphed into companies that had snooker tables or foozball machines so the staff could relax at work. This was often touted as a way to integrate your working life with you personal life. Oh sure, no better way to spend an evening than to play foozball with the same people you just spent 12 hours working with so that you can go back to work again after the last goal is scored. Taking time off work to play foozball with colleagues so that you could stay even later and work longer hours with no overtime, THAT is the very definition of being a stupid sap. When the VP of Marketing signed contracts that were impossible to deliver without the programming staff having to work weekends and for which he received a healthy commission only because that programming staff wasn't being paid for those weekends, well, it doesn't take an MBA to figure out who was being screwed. The foozball machine was the corporate equivalent of vaseline; it made the mounting easier to endure. Please be gentle.

I saw a quote once from some arrogant silicone valley CEO who said something like, "Commitment starts at 80 hours per week." It's not difficult to see the benefit to him if all his employees believe that.

In the 1970s film North Dallas Forty, the actor Nick Nolte played an aging professional football player whose time with the "team" was coming to an end. The story was about his coming to terms with that. In a scene near the end of the movie, he was in a conversation with his coach in a large boardroom and the team owners were in a far-away corner, out of earshot. I can't remember the exact words, but the coach said something about doing it for the team (probably quitting), to which Nolte answered, "The TEAM?!? We're not the team, we're the equipment, THEY're the team", as he looked toward the owners. Perceptive dialogue for a Hollywood movie, I thought.

The sad thing is that when a group of people gel into a cohesive team, it can be very rewarding and sometimes even thrilling. I have experienced this a couple of times, when the accomplishments of a group were greater than what could have been achieved by any of the individuals, and it was a real treat to be part of it. The best thing that management can do in a situation like that is to stay out of the way, interference can only foul things up. Knowing when not to interfere does not require management expertise, an MBA won't help, neither will a good suit or a booming voice, it requires the maturity of an intelligent adult. That must be why it's a rare talent.

Nuke on the Fritz

2009-09-07T15:58:00.002-04:00

I don't often write about political affairs, and this entry about Canadian politics may only interest a select few so I will keep it short. It concerns the peculiar behaviour of the current federal government toward nuclear affairs.

A little over a year and a half ago, the then head of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, Linda Keen, was fired. She had recently ordered the shutdown of the Chalk River nuclear reactor for safety related reasons. The reactor is operated by a crown corporation, Atomic Energy of Canada, wholly owned by the government of Canada. At that time, the reactor produced a quarter of the world's supply of radioactive medical isotopes. There are only a handful of producers of this material in the world, a worrying thought in itself. It is standard operating procedure to shut reactors down for maintenance from time to time, but that shutdown at Chalk River had been ordered by the Safety Commission. They are an arm's length regulatory body of the government and shutting things down when they are deemed unsafe is their job. After ordering the shutdown, Keen began to receive pressure from the sitting government to revoke the shutdown. The government said that they were doing this to avert a shortage of isotopes, that their priority was cancer patients. Various industry experts said that there was plenty of worldwide supply, that other reactor sites would ramp up to pick up the slack, also normal operating procedure, but the calm voices of experts were drowned out. Keen resisted political interference, was threatened with dismissal, refused to cry uncle, and was sent packing. The new head of the Commission did what the politicians wanted and the reactor was brought back up online. See this article from the Toronto Star for a summary of the shenanigans.

I remember thinking at the time that it was not such a good idea that the decisions of nuclear engineers be overruled by politicians. They can't possibly know better. In an odd turn a few months later, the government expressed the opinion that they should not be in the business of making radioactive isotopes at all, but rather that it may be better if the company was privatized. It was peculiar timing to say such a thing. Since the reactor's problems were widely known, partly because of the public firing of Keen, it seemed like the wrong time to be talking about selling AECL to private interests. Shouldn't you try to sell stuff when its value is high? Shortly after that, I remember reading that the government was showing a reluctance to invest any money in the maintenance the old reactor at Chalk River. A new replacement design that had been put forward by AECL was also not favoured.

Then in late spring of this year (2009), AECL was forced to shut down the reactor after all because of a heavy water leak. Initially, they planned to shut it down for a month, but later estimated that repairs would take till the end of the year. This seemed to confirm that Linda Keen had been correct in ordering a overhaul of the reactor, but I did not read any media interviews with her. Soon after that, I saw a headline that Prime Minister Harper was unhappy with the slowness of repairs.

This is an bizarre sequence of events, to say the least. Your own safety engineer tells you that the reactor needs fixing so you fire her. Then, you refuse to put any resources into maintenance of the reactor, which was hitherto SO important to cancer patients that they preferred to risk keeping it operating rather than shutting it down. If the reactor is that important, doesn't that mean you should keep it in tip top condition? At the same time as all that is going on, the government talked about selling the nuclear isotope business to private interests. Then when the reactor actually breaks, the same government complains about the slowness of repairs.

That's a lot of mixed messages. Aside from the apparent mismanagement of the maintenance coupled with political interference in what is supposed to be an arm's length enterprise, I am mystified by the notion of privatization of an asset when its value is down. That seems like bad business, although it could be good for potential buyers.

Decision Making

2009-09-07T15:55:00.002-04:00

I live in a multistory townhouse with three washrooms. There are two full-service washrooms on the top and middle floors and what real estate agents call a "powder room" on the ground floor. We keep our main inventory of toilet paper in the washroom on the middle floor, and we transport a few rolls to the other two as needed. What often happens, as I head into the powder room on the lowest floor, is that I do a visual inspection of how much paper is left on the current in-use roll and check to see whether there are any replacements in the room. There are times when there are no replacements and the roll in the holder is partly depleted, and I have need of the facilities. I then have to make a decision, do I climb the 10 steps to the middle floor washroom to get some supplies, which is a return trip of about a minute, or do I take a chance that what is left on the roll will be enough.

The utter stupidity of making this decision at all, embarrasses me. The difficulties I would have if the amount of paper is inadequate are at least an order of magnitude greater than the psychological effort required to get more paper. What's the big deal, I wonder? If I walk up and down a few steps, I am guaranteed not to have a problem. It's not laziness, I know it's not laziness because I expend much more energy at many other tasks that are not nearly so important. There is no good reason not to get more paper. And yet, I sometimes hesitate. Why? It makes no sense to me, and I am the guy doing it.

So far, I have never been caught without enough paper, but I have had some close calls. I am fairly confident that I am not an utter moron, if for no other reason than that I have met a few morons in my life, and I am not like them. If I have occasional trouble making such a simple decision, what does this say about our species?

The toilet paper dilemma must be similar to the kind of bad decision people make when they run out of fuel in a car with a working petrol gauge. I cannot understand why they put off buying more fuel. What is it that they think they're gaining by delaying the purchase of gasoline? There is no escape from the fact that the car will stop when it runs out of fuel. Isn't it easier to get some more while the car is still working rather than having to walk?

I recently replaced our automobile. The new one has an AM/FM/CD player with a button that allows one to choose from a fixed set of graphic equalizer settings. Almost all settings annoy me except one, No. 3. (Just like on the television series, The Prisoner, the settings have a number but no name.) The radio's behaviour puzzled me at first and it took some fiddling to figure out what was going on. When powering the radio off and back on, the equalizer would sometimes return to its default setting and I would have to then reset it to No. 3, but sometimes the radio would turn back on still in the No. 3 setting. It turns out that the equalizer setting is remembered only when a CD is playing at the time that the unit is turned off. Why would someone design it this way? Why not just always remember all the current settings.

When you've been listening to a CD, it would be annoying if the player reverted back to the first track every time you went to the grocery store or gas station. It makes perfect sense that the unit would store the current track, and location within the track, so that the music would pick up where it left off when you next returned to the car. I suspect most people would find it unacceptable if CD players did not do this. Also storing the equalizer setting seems like a natural thing to do to me, but for some reason, the designers did not think that this was important in radio mode, although it does remember the last radio station that I was listening to, funnily enough. I think that this design is an example of a bad decision. You could argue that it's not a particularly important one, unless someone with less sense than me buys a similar model and obsesses over the equalizer one day when a kid runs out into the street in front of the car. I know, I know, this is an utterly preposterous hypothetical situation. But people are run over by cars every day and it's not farfetched to imagine that some of those tragedies happen because the driver was fiddling with some button or other on the dashboard. Why did someone decide to treat radio play differently than CD play?

Why do you hesitate when you know what you should do? I wonder if it is related to when you were little and your mother wanted you to perform some chore and you didn't want to, so you resisted even though it was futile. Is that what we are all doing? Are we forever reliving childhood tantrums in our daily adult lives? Are our brain cells simply hardwired this way?

It would be interesting to compare my behaviour with that of modern youth who never did or do what their parents tell them, and their parents never correct the behaviour. What are they going to do about toilet paper then they are in their fifties? Are they going to whine and throw temper tantrums because there's no roll anywhere in the house because they never go shopping, because their moms always did that?

Unreal Estate

2008-12-19T22:36:00.001-05:00

On a recent overnight trip out of town, we stayed in a mid-range hotel in southern Ontario. We don’t subscribe to cable television at home, so it’s only when travelling that we can see what’s on in the 500-channel universe. We enjoy Holmes on Homes (HGTV) and so we tuned into that station for a couple of hours to wind down after a rainy six-hour highway drive.

That particular Wednesday evening was real estate night on HGTV, and we watched a couple of shows that we would normally not be able to stomach. The first was a program about something called “home staging”. Apparently, you can go to a school to learn to be a “stager”, and that school was prominently mentioned several times during the show. The idea behind “staging” a home is that a suitably decorated place will sell more quickly and for more money than one that’s not. The program shows people busily buying stuff to quickly decorate a house before going on the market. Staging can get surprisingly expensive, but the sellers who are paying for it don’t mind because the ultimate selling price makes it worthwhile. So we’re told. They never said what happens to all the props once the house is sold.

I find this bizarre. As a buyer, I would prefer to see a bare house so I can see more of it and less of someone else’s decor. If that brings down the price, well isn’t that good for me? Why would buyers be willing to spend more just because the house they’re looking at has some temporary furniture in it? But I am probably wrong about this, as I have ample life evidence that I don’t have a clue about marketing. But I believe that what’s actually happening is that buyers out there are gullible morons, who have been suckered by con men into believing bullshit so that they will spend more money for no good reason. But what do I know?

There was also a one-hour program featuring three “high-end” real estate agents in southern California. The cameras followed three young guys around for a few days as they wheeled and dealed in the very expensive housing market there. The least expensive home featured on the show was selling for about two million dollars. All three drove large Mercedes automobiles. Life is always sunny on the coast.

The camera followed one of the agents into a shoe store where he spent $600 on a pair of custom-designed Italian imported sneakers, the latest thing. While there, one of the other agents wandered in and they talked for a while, in false reality TV coincidence. During the conversation the first asked the other what he thought of his new shoes. The other said, “I’m down with those sneakers,” and they high-fived each other. Buying shoes, an achievement worth celebrating.

Later, one of the agents went into a clothing store to cheer himself up. He bought five or six new suits, some shirts, socks, and the total came to over $8000. He stuffed the clothes into the trunk of his Benz and he drove off to a house-showing. The cameras followed that particular agent into his shower, later at home, as he prepared for a blind date. He’s bi-sexual and his friends were arranging for him to meet a new guy that evening at supper. The camera crew actually followed him into the shower stall to film him soaping up; this had the subtle effect of demonstrating how large his bathroom was. They also filmed part of the dinner party and the touching goodbye at the door with the new would-be boyfriend. They agreed to remain friends, but alas they hadn’t really clicked. Lonely boys in the big city; money and a silver Benz ain’t everything, I guess.

One of the last segments of the episode involved the agent with the $600 sneakers again. His client was a divorcée of some corporate big shot, who was looking for a beach house for the summer so that her 15-year old son could go surfing. Surfing on the water, I mean, not the web. She looked to be in her mid-forties, with that plastic-surgeon produced stretched-skin veneer sheen on her forehead and cheeks, a look I associate with females who have too much money and not enough to do. She rejected a couple of places because they were too far from the beach, even though the agent told her that she would have an extremely difficult time finding a beachfront property that late in the season. But, like many rich spoiled people who nearly always seem to get their way, she insisted, and the agent eventually earned his sneakers. He found her a fully-furnished 4-bedroom Malibu beach house for only $75,000 per month, in a neighbourhood with many other A-list celebrity tenants. The agent used the actual words "A-list celebrity". Neighbours matter of course, you don't want bikers next door, but why does having movie stars living down the block make a house worth that much? But she was happy to pay $75,000 per month for three months so that her son could go surfing close to home where mommy could keep an eye on him. A happy ending for all.

As I watched this embarrassing parade of vapid caricatures, it occurred to me that if they ever caught Osama and brought him to trial in the USA, the defence could make use of programs like these. At some point, the bearded one would probably want to make the political point that the USA represented a debauched and evil culture that deserved to be destroyed. The defence could then show re-runs of these shows to the jury as supporting evidence. Of course, the argument would not convince any jury in the USA or anywhere else, nor should it, but it might make some jurors hesitate for a second or two before voting thumb’s down.

The Former Big Three

2008-12-16T18:48:00.001-05:00

What’s good for General Motors is good for the country. Remember that old slogan? I bet a lot of people believed it too.

The Former Big Three have been in the news a lot lately. To anyone paying attention, they have been in decline for a generation. Their various management teams have given many reasons for this, but I noticed that not one of them has blamed bad management. This is curious because they were never short of kudos when passing out bonuses to each during the past 30 years. If management is responsible for good decisions that lead to profit, then it stands to reason that they’re responsible for bad decisions that lead to bankruptcy. Aren’t they?

There was a media frenzy for a few days when the Former Big Three CEOs flew to Washington D.C. in corporate jets asking for handouts. They were turned down, but I think that the trip, the public hearings, and the subsequent rejection were theatre, just part of a show. The audience was us. Once they received their public drubbing and voiced some mea culpa spin, as per script, the three CEOs were back again a week later, flying commercially this time, with a “plan” on how to use the money that they were asking for, while at the same time asking for more money than the previous week. Does that mean that they didn’t have a plan the week before? Auto manufacturing CEOs asking for billions of dollars from the government, bold as can be, with no plan other than to keep themselves employed. It’s hard not to laugh out loud. It’s hard to believe that it wasn’t all the sad pilot for another reality TV show. But the governments in both Canada and the USA are actually now considering giving these clowns some money. Your money. My money. The money that we chose to spend buying someone else’s cars.

I figure that what was really going on was that those three CEOs were jealous of the confidence game that the financial sector had been able to pull off a few weeks earlier. I’m sure the three of them got together and said that if those slippery crooks on Wall Street could fleece people for years, lose the money, and then ask the government to save them, then damn it, we should be able to do the same. And a car or truck is a much simpler concept to explain to some corn pone Congressman than a tranche of worthless mortgage-backed piece of paper.

I love irony. Around the time of this phony public spectacle, Honda opened a new plant in Indiana. Two weeks ago, Toyota opened a new plant in Woodstock, Ontario employing 1200 people. The government is probably going to take money from the paychecks of those guys at the Toyota plant, and from you, and from me, and hand it over to the management teams that caused the decline and collapse of North America’s largest industry (other than the illegal drug trade, that is). Why do our governments think that this cabal will do a better job now? They don’t think that at all, of course. It’s all just a big lie and everyone knows it.

The thing is that I would be in favour of helping the North American auto industry but only under the following condition. All management at GM, Chrysler, and Ford above the level of shop foreman should be immediately fired without severance and replaced by Toyota and Honda retirees, who could then teach a new generation of North Americans how to design and build cars. Them, I would trust with the money.

Live Long and Prosper

2008-10-27T20:04:00.002-04:00

Several weeks ago the French CBC popular science program Découverte broadcast an episode on aging. They examined the subject from several points of view including biological, medical, quality of life, etc., and looked at the many ways that we are inventing to prevent or avoid or at least delay aging.

To not keep you in suspense, their summary of the current state of the art in living a longer life is to eat balanced meals, exercise daily, and remain mentally alert by challenging yourself in new activities regardless of your age. In short, the things we should do to live longer are all the usual things not promoted by our culture, which values sloth, television watching, mental inactivity, and encourages us from an early age to be helpless and dependent on others. I believe that widespread societal behaviours do not happen entirely by accident, so it must suit someone’s purposes to encourage us to behave this way.

While on vacation once in western Canada many years ago, we were having a mid-afternoon snack in one of the restaurants in the Chateau Lake Louise. Seated behind me were a retired, but not elderly, American couple on a tour through the Rockies. We couldn’t help overhearing them talk about their trip, and what seemed to be most important to them was the shopping in Banff and the fact that they never had to lift their own luggage at the up-market hotels that they were using. In short, they never had to do anything, and not only did that suit them, it was a much valued and sought-after goal. I wonder if they took the trouble to look at the mountains and rivers all around. Maybe they paid someone to do that for them. You have to be pretty limited in your imagination to go to Banff to shop, something you can do in any mall and at the very same chain stores.

The trouble with trying to combat aging is that in some ways, it’s like fighting evolution. The main reason our cells decide to stop regenerating so that we grow old and die is because our genes have been selected that way by Mother Nature. Once we have raised children, we have fulfilled our species’ requirement for self-perpetuation, and from that point on we are a burden. We need to die because we no longer serve any useful purpose and are dragging down the herd. It’s an uphill battle turning back forces of nature that have been in place for millions of years. But some people feel the need to try.

One segment of the program documented the move afoot by drug companies to develop and peddle anti-aging drugs. They have done some drug experiments on rats or mice (not long-term experiments since they are so inconvenient), and that seems to be enough to have spawned the usual snake oil salesmen who claim that taking some pill for life will not only lengthen your stay on the earth but will also make you more vital and energetic at the same time. At that point in the program, they were interviewing a holier-than-thou believer in his own superiority and I remember thinking how better off the gene pool would be if he met a bus head-on before procreating. Imagine how stupid you have to be to take drugs when you’re healthy, drugs that have not been tested for long-term effects, and to do this because some mice lived a few extra weeks in a lab somewhere. For all we know, those mice lived longer because good-looking lab assistants were hugging them while injecting the needle into their rumps. Maybe if some young babe dropped by your house every day and gave your butt a squeeze, you might live longer too.

The most bizarre interviewee on the program was a member of a starve-to-live-longer movement. I had never heard of that. Apparently, someone in a lab somewhere did some tests (on mice or rats again) and discovered that if you kept the poor animals on a subsistence diet, about 1/3 of the normal daily intake, they would live significantly longer. So this fellow (and others like him) cut his dietary intake to 1/3 the daily norm for a man his age and plans to continue to live his life this way. Not surprisingly, he has an emaciated face, dull eyes (but maybe he always did), a weak voice, and reports that he is in constant hunger day and night, and has to wear sweaters and heavy linens all the time because he is perpetually cold. He has calculated, based on the rat data, that he will live from five to ten years longer this way. I can’t remember his age, but he looked to be in his mid-forties so he was looking at 30 to 40 more years of constant hunger and cold, all so that he could eek out an additional 5 to 10 years of that depressing existence. Why would this appeal to someone? I remember thinking to myself at the time that if he were a dog, some vets would recommend putting him out of his misery.

Re-evaluation

2008-06-08T15:12:00.004-04:00

Sometimes it’s good to revisit assumptions, think about things that you take for granted, re-examine old ideas and beliefs. Not always, but sometimes.

One thing that I remember from my youth was that I did not like pineapple. It turned out that what I didn’t like was the yellow pineapple-based goop that they put on banana splits in ice cream parlours. I don’t recall my family ever buying a fresh pineapple, and so I didn’t really know what they tasted like, I just thought I did. When I was in my late 20s, I had my first taste of fresh pineapple and it turned out to be really very good. I still object to putting it on pizza, however.

Another food item that I didn’t think I liked was popcorn. I like the smell of it but not the taste. Then one day in my early adulthood I had some microwaved popcorn and loved it. It turns out that what I don’t like is salty popcorn with dripping soggy wet butter. I like natural unadorned popcorn. I won’t even discuss that food item that is sold in cinemas that consists of popped corn covered with a yellow, oily, smelly ooze whose origins are probably inside a petro-chemical plant. My own personal belief is that whatever that stuff is, it can probably be used as a chemical weapon.

There was an interesting article in the November 5, 2007 edition of Macleans magazine titled, Why men are getting happier (and women more miserable), credited to three writers, Nancy Macdonald, Lianne George and John Intini. The article is based on the concept of measuring “happiness”, a topic that has caught on with social thinkers, economists and nobodies like me.

They cite social statistics collected in the last few decades that seem to show that, in our industrialized societies at least, women are becoming less happy, while men are becoming happier. They dub it the “happiness gap”. They give several examples of heterosexual couples, either still living together or not, where the male half seems to be enjoying his existence, his activities, the way he conducts his life, while the female half report constant and growing stress with the life that she is living. The cases presented are anecdotal of course, but are given as examples to illustrate the point. In some of the examples, the males have abandoned the workaday grind to establish new lives in the arts or other more personal pastimes, while the women embraced the relatively new feminist attraction to life-validating careers. It is a perplexing development given how the “career” was billed as the great liberator of our age, and that women would find their independence and self-worth through work. The books don’t seem to be balancing though, because if those promises had validity, women should be happier at this point than they seem to be. Why aren’t they?

The article presents various analyses of the phenomenon. The usual right-wing loonies argue that women are happier in the home looking after babies, so that this trend is no surprise. Sure, and popsicles still cost a nickel. Others propose that female emergence as corporate leaders is still ultimately stifled and that therefore the workplace presents more frustration than reward. That is a tempting thesis but to my mind it is unconvincing. The pursuit is as important as the attainment and should provide its own reward, and so to my mind, the argument does not explain the growing trend to “unhappiness”. I don’t doubt that not all deserving females self-actualize in the corporate world, but a lot do and in any case not all deserving males ever did either. Another point of view states that maybe females expected too much from the world of work and are now disappointed at the non-delivery, in short they were sold a bill of goods.

The article points to the decrease in the number of men attending universities, across many disciplines, and a slow trend among males to abandon the workplace treadmill. This seems to be a disturbing societal effect that we are seeing for the first time. It is an odd social development that able-bodied healthy males are moving away from the work-to-success pattern that was taken for granted in previous generations. I suggest that you search for that article and read it. It consists of four pages of text with hardly any pictures and so there is no way that I can do it justice in this meager summary.

However, I think that it is instructive to set aside the current accepted thinking on the matter and re-examine the basic data: 1) women are working more and are becoming more unhappy and 2) men are working less and becoming happier.

Maybe then, work just sucks.

One hundred and fifty years ago, a guy would get up in the morning, look out over his fields and decide whether it was time to pick the corn. If not, he could head over to the barn and repair something. Or he could fix the shingles on the roof of his farmhouse. Or he and his wife could stay in bed and enjoy what a carnal life has to offer. He was at the mercy of the weather and the volatile prices of grain as determined by the commodity speculators of the day, but nevertheless, he and his wife decided for themselves how to spend their days, the way their ancestors had done for centuries. The days weren’t always pleasant, of course, that goes almost without saying, but are yours? Moving ahead in time, that farmer’s children spent 18 hours a day in West Virginia coal mines making barely enough money to cover the rent and food, and more often than not they could not make ends meet, because that’s how the system was designed to operate. The son of that farmer did not control how he spent his days. Do you think many coal miners self-actualized? A generation or two after that and people now spend their days staring at computer screens and living in suburbs so ugly that every once in a while, one of them goes berserk and shoots a group of innocent people at a burger joint or on a college campus.

Maybe the kinds of work that we have created for ourselves, to which we try to attach life validation simply are not up to the task. Maybe the jobs that most people spend their days doing are just not that important or life affirming, and maybe many of our careers do not amount to much in the end. Some do, but a lot do not. Maybe it’s a mistake to try and link meaning in our lives to jobs like that. Maybe what’s happened is that when a generation of women entered the workforce to compete for mens’ jobs, a lot of the boys took a step back and said, “Ladies, you can have them, I’m going fishing.”

Thank you Phill Watson, wherever you are

2008-06-08T10:16:00.002-04:00

In the mid-1980s I worked for a small IT consulting company in Toronto where I met a British ex-pat named Phill Watson. It was during the time that I knew him that he decided to move himself and his family back to Britain. I have lost contact with him, but want to thank him for something.

One day during a conversation about television, he mentioned that he and his wife were addicts of that prime time soap opera, Dallas. I was surprised to hear that and told him so. I had a low opinion of the program although I hadn’t watched it, having made assumptions about it. If you remember, that was the show that sparked the summer long “Who shot J.R.?” media frenzy, as the previous season had ended in a cliffhanger when the main “bad guy” protagonist was gunned down by an off-camera mystery shooter.

He went on to explain that I was missing the point by mistakenly judging the program using the standards of drama. His opinion was that the program was a comedy, a spoof, that it was satire and that it was a joke being played on the viewers by sophisticated writers. “Who do you think those writers are?” he asked. “They’ve read Shakespeare, they know literature”, he added. His point was that whoever they were, they were educated people who knew exactly what they were doing. He suggested that I watch the next episode and listen carefully to the dialogue. “Listen to the words that come from those actors’ mouths”, he urged, “Listen carefully and then try to tell me that those writers aren’t having the time of their lives writing that stuff.” His take was that the show was high comedy but that nobody realized it because there was no laughtrack. There were no long pauses after exaggerated punchlines that audiences had been trained to recognize as cues to laughter, the way they learned to do watching boilerplate situation comedies.

So I tried watching and I had the time of my life. The show was truly funny. Once I got in on the joke being played, I ended up enoying the program tremendously. I even got into the habit of trying to predict what nonsense would come up next and became pretty good at it. In the last couple of seasons, I think that the writers ran out of ideas and the program lost its way, rehashing old plotlines too many times. It became a little too difficult to believe that the by then older J.R. could have such a powerful sexual hold on attractive young women. You can only carry that one off for so long. I suppose that’s no different to what happened (and happens) to many television shows. American television has a tendency to milk their cows long after they’ve stopped giving fresh milk. But it was fun while it lasted.

Thanks Phill, I hope you’re still enjoying TV.

Southern Plumbing

2008-01-20T14:20:00.000-05:00

I am not a good shopper. I don’t mean that I am not careful about what I buy, but rather that I tend not to buy much beyond what I need. In that sense, I am not very useful to a society that expends enormous amounts of time, energy, and money trying to convince us that shopping is a valid leisure time activity, a hobby even. Our culture has convinced many of us that clothing is worth more, lots more, because of a label that’s attached to it. It convinces many of us to pay extra for the privilege of providing advertizing for the makers of that clothing by displaying that label in public. It convinces us to feel pride and self-worth because we are doing that advertizing for them. In the jargon of the marketing trade, some of us find identity in the wearing of those labels and logos. This observation is not new of course, but it is still astonishing to me that this happens and I think it’s worth reminding ourselves of the utter foolishness of this behaviour from time to time. If we don’t remind ourselves, there’s always the danger that we will start to think that this is normal. We impoverish ourselves, and make others richer, by giving our money to people who give us labels and logos in return. And we have to work for hours on end to earn the money to buy those labels. Would you shovel two feet of snow from your neighbour’s driveway if all you got in return was a label to sew onto your shirt pocket? People do precisely that every day.

I have yet to buy a shirt in this century. I buy new clothing when the old clothing wears out (or in the case of bell-bottoms, as soon as I could). I thought everyone was like this, but then I met people who bought clothing because they grew bored of the colours of their old stuff or because it had gone out of fashion. This is normal behaviour, and no one reading this is surprised that people do this. But we should be.

One result of this relative failure to adapt to the surrounding popular culture is that I can never earn a living in marketing. I have absolutely no idea what people enjoy, what they want, what they would spend their money on.

I accompanied my wife to a mall two weeks ago, and I did what I always do in malls. I looked for a bookstore, browsed for a while, bought a couple of books, and then headed for a coffee shop. I ended up walking most of length of the mall to get to that bookstore and counted seven stores dedicated to the selling of cell phones. I also passed electronic and department stores that also sell cell phones. I do not understand why everyone needs to talk on telephones so much; I would never have predicted this. Had some incompetent Board of Directors hired me to be the CEO of their electronic communications division 15 years ago, I would have cancelled cell phone development. To anyone reading this who may be considering hiring me as your CEO, my advice is to forget the idea.

Near my home is a pet grooming business that offers a web cam service. You can sit at your computer and watch your pooch’es fur being trimmed or having its toenails clipped. I would never have thought of offering that service.

Just below is a photograph of a sign here in Ottawa. It is from a homeopathic-type wellness centre, or something like that. I don’t actually know what they do, but it is the last item on their list of services that caught my eye.

It would never have occurred to me that there would be retail consumer demand for rectal douching. I associate an enema as a relief of last resort for constipation or as a preparation for other medical procedures related to our southern plumbing. In either case, the big E is something I think of as a semi-clinical procedure and not as something I would seek from a perfect stranger just for the hell of it while I’m out window-shopping on a Saturday afternoon. (Although there does seem to be a fetish interest in colonic irrigation; if you don’t know about this, try conducting a web search and prepare to be surprised.)

Economic and business reporting always mentions consumer expenditures as a fundamental aspect of economic health. Basically we‘re told that if we don’t shop, it’s bad for the country. But is that true or has it just been defined to be true by people who have a vested interest in its being true? Would you pay someone to wash out your rear exit for the good of the country’s economic health?

Psst, do you want to hear the Secret?

2008-01-07T19:57:00.000-05:00

Last Sunday I listened to a documentary on the CBC Radio One news and public affairs program Sunday Morning about the self-help movement known as The Secret. It was a re-broadcast of that segment. I had heard some of it the first time it was aired, several months ago, but had forgotten about it. It seems to be yet another in a long list of how-to-be-a-success movements that appear periodically. I have no idea if these kinds of movements are a worldwide phenomenon or not, but North Americans sure seem to respond to them. With this particular strategy, if you follow the prescribed formula, you are guaranteed to become rich because they have discovered a scientifically proven method of achieving wealth.

No, really, that’s what they say.

It started with a book, of course, but I can’t remember who wrote it and don’t much care. Predictably, there are follow-up books, web sites, self-declared gurus, retreats, tapes, CD’s, the usual fetish list of goodies to spend money on. But hey, even though it costs money, it’s really an investment because when you’re done, you will end being in the 1% of people who earn 90% of the world’s income (or some such number that was quoted on the air that I probably wrote down wrong, but the details don’t really matter). The beauty of these schemes is that if you don’t become rich, as per the schedule, then it’s because you didn’t really believe enough or weren’t trying hard enough, so you have to keep spending money on more tapes and more retreats and more gurus in the hopes that the magic will eventually stick.

The secret is no secret, actually. The basic beliefs are as follows, as far as I can determine, but I have to admit that I have a hard time listening to this stuff too carefully so I may not have the details exactly right. The science behind the secret is that the state of your mind affects the universal cosmic energy around you, and universal cosmic energy is a powerful force to harness, as we all know. If electrical utility companies could plug into that cosmic power bar, we’d be laughing. So, for example, if you truly believe that you’re going to be rich, but you have to really and truly believe it or the magic doesn’t work; if you truly believe it, then your mind’s positive energy will affect the universal cosmic energy field around you in such a way that the field will produce wealth for you, because that wealth is what you wanted.

So, what you want is what you get. It’s a scientifically proven fact, they say.

There are downsides too, unfortunately. If your mind contains negative thoughts, then those too will be transmitted to the universal cosmic energy field in such a way that it will give you back bad stuff. This works in all aspects of life, not just monetary gain or loss. Negative thoughts may cause the universal cosmic field to give you cancer, or hemorrhoids, or the world’s worst in-laws. There is no end to the damage that you can wreak on yourself. It’s all up to you. If you’re poor, it’s because you didn’t want to NOT be poor badly enough. If you’re hit by a tsunami, your fault. Lightning strikes you in the head, what were you thinking?

They interviewed one guy (sorry, can’t remember the name) who went so far as to say that rape victims may set themselves up as victims by being fearful of rape. Fear, needless to say, is negative. If they were more positive about rape, then the universal cosmic energy field would thwart the mouth-breather away from them and onto some other poor woman whose mind was more negative. But, and this is the really depressing thing, the distortion in the universal cosmic energy field may not even be caused by the rape victim herself. It turns out that if the people around her, her parents, friends, etc., are themselves fearful of rape, thus negative, they may in fact alter that cosmic field in such a way as to attract the rapist to that victim. You can see how important it is to surround yourself with positive thinkers. But the interviewee went on to say that being raped might not even necessarily be a bad thing. Some rape victims go on to become exceptional rape counselors, something that they may not have discovered otherwise. That’s when I turned the radio off.

As I have said before on these pages, I don’t believe that anything happens entirely by accident. Someone always benefits from the evolution of a system, and systems evolve in ways that always benefit someone. It’s never entirely random. We live in an age of culture-wide ignorance of basic science and philosophy. We’ve been trained to be sheep. Politicians, for example, are chosen for those qualities that make them appear television-friendly even though those qualities have little or no bearing on the skills they need to do the job we elect them for. Why are we oblivious to this obvious fact? We are losing the basic human capacity to distinguish between reality and bullshit. And there’s big profit in bullshit, because you don’t ever have to actually make or deliver anything for the money you charge. Snake oil scams are nearly as good as casinos, that way. The profitable reciprocity between mass ignorance and the ability to sell people crap, that’s the Secret.

I believe that the people who hunt for Big Foot in the Rocky Mountain foothills have more credibility than the wackos who believe in Secrets.

The Doctor Is In

2008-01-07T15:51:00.000-05:00

The good Dr. Phil has become a staple of US daytime television. It’s probably an unfair and limiting summary of his views, but he seems to primarily and firmly believe in the sanctity of the American nuclear family. He just has trouble finding any.

He irritates me. He’s the latest in a long line of snake oil salesmen, a peculiar staple of American popular culture, who stands up in front of people to tell them why he and his family lead a perfect life and how, if they would only just listen to him, could do the same. To be fair, some of things he says make good sense; maybe immature teenage morons shouldn’t be getting pregnant and raising children; maybe you shouldn’t spend your last grocery money on lingerie catalogue shopping, especially when you weigh 300 pounds and have cheesies and coke for breakfast.

But if he’s going to save Middle America, he should pick people worthy of saving. I caught a segment one day about a married couple who were having problems in their relationship, and the doc had housed them in a sort of halfway house built for the purpose of marital retreat. The main feature of this house is that it has video cameras everywhere that can record every moment of the couple’s interactions. The immediate cause of marital discord, on this day, was the habit that the wife had of picking up guys at the dance club where she stripped, and subsequently having affairs with them. The latest such guy was in the house on camera to discuss the situation.

I am not making a value judgment on the ethical or moral values of strippers. For most of them, it’s probably just a job. What irritated me about the show was that Phil took a run at the guy she was having an affair with, accusing him of breaking up the nuclear family. That fellow happened to be single, so why was he interfering with a married couple? Phil berated him, basically chased him off the show and out of the house, all to supportive audience applause. Think about it. Some guy walks into a strip bar to check out the action, gets lucky with one of the strippers who takes a liking to him, does the reasonable thing, which is to have sex with her, and now we (the audience) are supposed to believe that he’s the problem. Please. Fifty percent of American marriages fail; get off your high horse, doc. On the face of it, I’d say that splitting up is the best thing that could happen to this particular couple. It doesn’t sound to me like it was meant to be.

I heard about but did not watch another recent episode about a peculiar emerging phenomenon, branding. People get together, put irons in a fire, and burn brands on each other’s skin, like they do with cattle in westerns. When the doc asked one of the participants why he did this, the fellow replied that he and his friends didn’t have anything better to do and he wanted to feel what it was like to be branded.

I think that shows like Dr. Phil’s and other similar ones on television should have a little graph at the bottom of the screen, showing the gradual steady decline in the quality of the human gene pool.

Duh

2008-01-07T15:01:00.000-05:00

We probably all have in our circle of acquaintances a know-it-all (maybe more than one) who tries to tell everyone else what to do. This behaviour is very odd. Despite the obvious evidence that we have managed to lead successful lives for decades, for some reason these people conclude that without their guidance we will fall into a life catastrophe at any moment. I have not been afflicted by this plague much, but the situation has cropped up from time to time. Because we are free to choose our friends, this kind of personality, once identified, can often be avoided outside family relationships. When we’re related to someone like that, simple avoidance stategies may not always work.

I am not referring to the occasional helpful hint from a friend on how to remove a stuck lug nut when changing winter tires or advice from a good cook on how to avoid sticky residue on frying pans. I mean the kind of person who tells you how to write a computer program when you have been doing so for 20 years and they just learned how to reboot their PC yesterday afternoon. I am talking about the kind of person who tries to convince you that you can enlarge, infinitely, a one-megapixel resolution digital photograph to 16 by 20 inches because we have powerful computers now. What strikes me about people like this is that even if you have the patience to ever so slowly explain to them what is wrong with their thinking, they seem incapable of understanding the explanation, and because of that failure they persist in believing that they are correct. It is as though they think that because they don’t understand what you’re telling them, then they must be right.

Put crudely, not only are they stupid, but they’re also too stupid to realize that they’re stupid. A double whammy.

I was lost in a reverie at work one day about this very dilemma when I came across this reference from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 77, no. 6, pp. 1121-1134. The article is entitled “Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments” and was written by J. Kruger and D. Dunning at Cornell University. They begin the article with an anecdote about a guy who robbed two banks in broad daylight on the same day without any facial disguise. He was very surprised when he was arrested that evening. He did not understand why the lemon juice that he had put on his face failed to render the video cameras ineffective, something he firmly believed to be the case. I don’t happen to know anyone that stupid, but it illustrates the point.

The authors conducted a series of tests in various areas such as, grammar, logical reasoning, humour, etc. and found that the people who scored the worst on these tests systematically overestimated their performance. They believed that they were better than they were. Interestingly, those who scored in the highest quartile tended to underestimate their performance. Their final conclusion is stated thus: “…We propose that those with limited knowledge in a domain suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it…” Having only barely scratched the surface of their research, I am certain that I have not fully conveyed their findings. I urge you to read the article yourselves; I believe that it’s available online. Still, it’s nice to know that my personal prejudices were vindicated in at least one laboratory experiment. The potential negative ramifications on corporate and political leadership are self-evident. To some of us.

You have to be careful when applying these findings however. Just because stupid people don’t know when they are wrong, does not mean that people, who think that they are right, are stupid. Sometimes, they may in fact be right and it’s you who are stupid. It’s an important distinction. Other difficulties arise from the relativity of what we consider to be intelligence. Just as there are always lots of people stupider than you (just look around), it is also always true that there are lots of people smarter than you (again, look around but these may be more difficult for you to spot for the very reasons alluded to in the article). If you’re at a party and say something that you think is very clever and everyone else looks away or changes the subject, it may be because you have just said something very stupid, without realizing it. When that happens, try to find a dumber-looking bunch of people to hang out with.

Idolatry

2007-11-12T18:57:00.000-05:00

Regular readers will have noticed that I have not written about Britney Spears or Paris Hilton or any of the other icons of modern day popular culture. Don’t worry; I am not going to start now. They are more than capable of bringing ridicule on themselves, and nothing I could write would top that. The question arises, why does our society worship at their altar, as it seems to. There are daily television shows, some in prime time, that actually use the phrase celebrity news. I have heard this with my own ears.

On page 64 of the October 1st, 2007 edition of Macleans magazine, there is a two-page spread dedicated to this year’s Toronto International Film Festival (known as TIFF). The report consists of several short articles along with a few pictures of some of filmdom’s celebrities. The first article was about the fan-caused traffic jams that some celebrities endured at the 2007 TIFF. Traffic jams are routine to people in Toronto, but I guess when it happens to someone who has been in movies, it’s considered news these days. One limo ride of the star-pair of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt was especially annoying. I will quote part of the piece:

…Hundreds of fans didn’t just crowd around their vehicle, some climbed onto it, and one woman thrust her baby against one of the windows. When a publicist begged the mother to withdraw for sake of the child’s safety, she refused, screaming, “I don’t care, I want my baby to see Brad.

I have had some enthusiams during my life. I understand what it feels like to get excited about something. I think that most people do, and I think that it’s perfectly normal. I have never stood up screaming at a concert, but have grown accustomed to others doing so. I think it’s a little over the top but some people are more expressive than others. Some of it may be show, some of it may be genuine; who am I to judge, how can I look into their brain to tell the difference? However, I lack the literary skills required to properly express my revulsion toward a woman who is so profoundly stupid that she could think that her baby gives a toss about Brad Pitt. Brad may be a perfectly nice guy, but why would her baby care. In our culture, it’s normal for teenage girls to scream and cry when there are stars around. Once you procreate though, it’s time for a little maturity.

The old testament god turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt because she dared looked back at the fun house she was leaving. After a few years of booze, sex, and general debauchery in Sodom, Gomorroah, and a couple of other places, yahweh had had enough and made it known to Lot that it was time to leave. Don’t look back he said, pack up your kit, family, and scram. But on the way out of that neighbourhood, Lot’s wife disobeyed and looked back. For that, the big man turned her into a pillar of salt. That’s cold, man. She had just spent a few years in sin city, probably enjoyed it, so was it so terrible for her to want to take one last look. I wonder whether it was really the look back that bothered the old man, or that she looked back longingly? Maybe at the last minute she started wondering whether following her hairy old husband out the party was such a good idea. Maybe she had originally joined the party because Lot was a little boring. We’ll never know. I think it was pretty harsh punishment no matter how you look at it, but that’s how things seemed to be in the old days, or so we’re told. You couldn’t worship at the altar of booze, sex, and drugs in those days, not for long.

Extreme salination was the steep price of idolatry two or three thousand years ago. Now, it’s everywhere all around us every day and we press out babies up against the windows for a better look. How empty does your life have to be to act this way?

The Daily News

2007-10-29T19:50:00.000-04:00

For years I was subscribed to a daily newspaper but stopped reading it when I realized that I was only interested in the comics. I have never been a watcher of the evening television news. At some point I figured out that I didn’t care about most of what happens every day in the world. With the possible obvious exception of natural disasters with wow visuals that only television can show properly, I don’t believe that most of what happens matters. I prefer to wait and read what a weekly newsmagazine, with more in depth analyses, has to say about domestic and world events. My reasoning is that a week’s time is enough to filter out the trivial and that what makes it through the filter may truly matter to me.

But this morning, while waiting in a car dealership’s service lounge to discover what was the awful stink coming out of my car’s heater, I looked through the Ottawa Citizen. The Ottawa Citizen is a respectable newspaper with business news and a large weekend real estate section that’s thick enough to use as kindling in our fireplace; it’s no gossip tabloid with pictures of babes and stereo ads.

There was a story about some goings on in Harare, ruled by Robert Mugabe, someone that is generally acknowledged to have despotic tendencies. About a year ago an old spiritual healer woman claimed that she could extract diesel oil from a stone by hitting it with her cane. Believing that their country’s energy problems were over, the government gifted her with a few million dollars and one of those farms that the Mugabe government had reclaimed from white colonial farmers. Then one day not long ago, they decided that the jig was up and she’s now in jail for defrauding the government.

I don’t know what’s more amazing about the story, her ability to keep the con game going for a year, or officialdom’s inability to discover it sooner. Did some lowly functionary from an obscure department stop off at the rock to top up his tank, and then fire off a memo or email that someone actually read?

Some conspiracy theorists maintain that the world’s media is just a vast playing field for dark forces that are attempting to keep us all at bay and happy at work by numbing us with pablum. Maybe it’s true. Maybe, if we didn’t have a story like this now and then to give us a good belly laugh, we might load the shotgun and blow the head off that twerp next door who can’t figure out how to keep his garbage can’s lid on properly, letting his refuse spill all over the driveway yet again. I mean, how often do you have to be told something that obvious before forfitting your right to keep breathing? Maybe if we took the time to think about our lives, we might not want to drone ourselves into a stupor for forty years at some desk or press punch machine. Maybe, to keep the wheels moving, we need to have our minds numbed.

Can you imagine what it must feel like for the people in that country, who have suffered unimaginable misery for decades at the hands of one whack job after another, to perhaps one day find themselves at a polling booth, watched over by UN inspectors, able to enjoy democracy at its most basic, can you imagine what it might feel like for them to read over the list of candidates on that polling card and see the names of jackasses who think that diesel oil comes out of rocks? I don’t know how to express such despair. I picture the poor voters turning the card over to see if there are any other names on the back, and not finding any. They’d be better off letting that old woman run the country with her magic cane.

So that’s why I don’t read the daily papers nor do I watch the evening news. That crap can’t possibly be real. It’s got to be a joke. Nothing else makes sense.

By the way, the stink from my car’s heater turned out to be dried leaves and twigs being charred by the heater fan motor. I was probably minutes away from having a campfire under my hood.

Rideau Canal

2007-09-16T16:13:00.000-04:00

I spent part of this past spring and summer photographing the locks on the Rideau Canal system. I am not a boater so it was fun visiting places that I would not usually see. Many of the locks are very close to highways and visiting them is a bit like dropping into a parallel universe, always there but just out of sight. I wonder what else we miss by not looking. I am planning to visit some of them again to shoot photos in autumn colours. The locks south of Westport tend to be set in especially scenic forest locations.

This is the 175th year of the building of the Rideau Canal system and it was declared a World Heritage Site in conjunction with that anniversary. Before reading the related media coverage, I had no idea that the waterway routinely attracts international visitors. What I can tell you is that on weekends there are long waits at some of the more popular locks. I overheard one heated discussion between a boater and lock station attendant one Saturday afternoon at Chaffey's Locks. Arguing about the slow progress seemed like a waste of time to me; locks can only operate in one direction at a time and can only hold a limited number of boats. Movement on the system is leisurely at best. I guess that's what happens when Type A personalities go on vacation.

There are cemetaries along the system containing the graves of some of the men who worked on the building of the canal. I guess that carving and moving heavy stones in untamed bush can take its toll. I was surprised to find out that malaria was a common cause of death during construction.

I photographed the locks for fun, but I have also made them available for sale on the Quickpixels stock photo site whose link appears on this page. (A search using "RRR" shows all my photographs, but a search using only the keyword "Rideau" instead will restrict the selection. Many photographers are represented by that site so you may see similar pictures from others when doing a keyword search.)

Most of the lock stations have picnic facilities and some include riverside parks with historic displays and museums. People will be travelling from all over the world to see the system and it’s right here in our own backyard. And visiting is free. The picture above was taken at the Hartley Lock, a short walk from Carleton University here in Ottawa.

Buy land, they stopped making it.

2007-09-15T13:42:00.000-04:00

During a recent trip to Toronto we visited a rural gift shop, show farm, and bakery on the Niagara Escarpment near Milton. It's called Springridge Farm and offers strawberry picking, hayrides, farm visits for kids along with a gift shop and top-notch bakery. The pies, tarts and coffee are first rate.

We were visiting the place with a fellow who makes his living selling real estate. Springridge Farms sits on a south-facing slope abutting the limestone cliff walls of the Niagara Escarpment. It's a beautiful spot and I think it occupies the site of what used to be a working family farm. The gift shop, bakery, and hayrides must be what economists call value-added services. Apparently, in the First world you can't make a living growing and selling food anymore, for some reason. It's odd that it's easier to make a living doing something utterly useless like writing gaming software than it is to grow food. That must be "supply and demand" at work.

At one point, the real estate guy and I were outside looking over the property and he remarked what a great site it would be for an eight or nine unit executive estate development. This struck me as odd because I think that it already is a beautiful location and I can't think of anything that a modern suburban executive development could add that would improve the place. Now, I was looking at the scenery but I suspect that he was thinking about sales commissions. It's funny how the very features that make a site attractive to prospective builders and buyers are precisely those that get destroyed during development. After the escarpment development is built, there is no escarpment left to look at.

I enjoy real estate jargon; one of my pleasures in life is reading the advertisements on real estate billboards. For example, what executive estate means nowadays is a mock "something"-style monster home on a too-large lot. I am sure that you have seen the type of property that I mean: a place with all the trees removed to reduce construction costs, acres of green lawn that no one uses, a multiple car garage, and usually an empty pool. I know I am exaggerating but when was the last time you saw a bunch of kids playing touch football on the front lawns of one of these places or swimming in the backyard pool. Those kids are all at Whistler. Only squirrels enjoy those vast grasslands and so the question arises why people covet them. I think it comes down to showing off. Having a huge expanse of useless green grass is a way of telling the world that you have so much money you can spend it on something perfectly useless. Removing the trees makes it easier to see the land waste as you drive by. What's the point of showing off if no one can see? There's a market for this kind of place, obviously. I don't understand it myself; were money to drop down from on high into my lap, the last thing I would do is advertize to the world that I had it. But I guess showing off is a primeval thing, with genetic roots going back to dominant bucks in antelope herds and big-shouldered wolf pack alpha males.

So who would have suspected that real estate nirvana was only a few kilometres from my own house? Take a look at the sign at the entrance to the Avalon subdivision here in east Ottawa. I have masked out the developer's name so as not to single them out. It doesn't really matter who they are of course, since they are each worse than the next. Perfectly planned, they announce. Wow, paradise, valhalla, land of dreams, and only 5 km away. The mythological Avalon is an island best known for its sublime apples; Paula Reds for the gods, I suppose. I drove through this "perfectly planned" neighbourhood. Not an orchard in sight.

Here at the eastern edge of the city, cornfields turn into suburbia on a daily basis. As usual with this kind of urban development, it is resulting in serious roadway bottlenecks because road design and construction never seems to keep up with house building. You would think that after 60-70 years of this, city planners would have figured out how to better deal with this kind of expansion.

I saw this very peculiar sign the other day. If someone out there can explain Zen Urban Flats to me, please do so. I guess I could drop by their sales office and ask but as I have said before on these pages, I am a firm believer in intellectual osmosis and I don't want to stand too close to folks who invent this stuff. I am forever fearful that whatever it is they have is contagious.

Who were those Masked Men?

2007-08-28T21:50:00.000-04:00

Last week, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, US President Bush, and the guy from Mexico whose name I can’t remember, met for a couple of days at the Chateau Montebello on the north shore of the Ottawa river, about halfway between Montreal and Ottawa. My wife and I visited there once and we were not impressed with the place. We could not get a cup of coffee and croissant. I hope our political leaders had better luck with pastry.

I have no idea what the leaders discussed, the media kept mentioning trade and security but that’s all they ever say these days. I think it’s just as likely that Bush wanted to get away from the stifling heat of the late summer family homestead in Texas and a Canadian river shore sounded as good a place as any. As for the Mexican guy, what with the drug cartels and murdered vacationers, I am sure that he doesn’t need much of a reason to leave the country for a few days. The substance of the meetings was kept secret, which displeased some people.

When I first heard about the meeting, I was not happy. Montebello is a small town, the main street is highway 148 and is the major east-west route between Montreal and Gatineau on the Quebec side of the river. It was easy to imagine a scenario that required the closing of that highway, causing major delays. In the lead up to the meeting, the media was frothing at the mouth with talk about demonstrations. It was protesters this, and possibility of violence that, and which police forces had jurisdiction where. (The details that I heard were that the RCMP were responsible for the grounds of the Montebello resort itself, the Sureté de Québec (SQ) was responsible for security on the roads and in the town, and the Ontairo Provincial Police (OPP) and the SQ shared responsibility for security on the Ottawa river.) The media positively lusted for a riot.

There wasn’t a riot. Not even close. There were some protesters of course, but they were so well-behaved that I don’t think they ever had to close the highway. And it’s only a two-lane highway, so it wouldn’t take much to clog it up.

However, there were three masked demonstrators who tried to instigate some violence by urging a group of protesters to storm a police line. The leaders of that particular group of protesters, some older union guys in jackets and slacks, pushed the would-be troublemakers aside, confronting them by asking them if they were police, which took the wind out of the agents provocateurs. I mean, what kind of a troublemaker can you be when the guys you’re trying to rile up are asking you to calm down and shut up. All of this was caught on video and broadcast on YouTube.

Amazingly, the accusations turned out to be true; the masked men were in fact undercover SQ police officers. The SQ authorities claimed that the undercover agents were not agents provocateurs, but rather were there to keep an eye on things, to protect the peaceful protesters from any possible violence. So, how do they explain the masks? I figure that they needed to wear masks for the same reason that Batman does. If people found out their secret identity then they could follow them back to the Batcave and steal the Batmobile.

Why did the SQ bother? Is it sadism? Did they just want to start a fight so that they could bust heads? Is that a fun thing to do? It’s plausible, I suppose, but whenever the police bust heads at street protests they never come off looking good. Is it job security? If there is a riot, then it proves that you are needed.

But if they were trying to incite a riot, couldn’t they find better provocateurs than this bunch? They weren’t very convincing and completely ineffective. Watch the YouTube sequence and you will see what I mean. It looked like a drunken fraternity stunt to me.

In my opinion, there are only two reasonable explanations for what happened. The first is that the police riot gear was bought on a one-year warranty and needed to be field-tested or it would soon to be too late to get their money back if it turned out to be defective. The second and to my mind more likely explanation is that the agents provocateurs decided to play a practical joke on their buddies in the police line. There was nothing happening riot-wise anyway, so why not have a little fun?

The mini-summit meeting ended with one of those pro forma photo opportunities where each of the leaders makes a little speech about something or other. They don’t say much, but no one is paying attention so it doesn’t matter. They don’t even bother to broadcast the speeches on the news, I noticed. They show 10-15 seconds of footage that they squeeze in before giving the sports scores.

To be honest, I don’t have a big problem with undercover police work. Keeping tabs on people, potentially volatile people, is a valid function of police intelligence. After all, who knows what wackos hang out at events like these. But please, do a better job next time.

How to Retire

2007-07-08T15:17:00.000-04:00

Two million dollars is a round number that I have heard put forward by financial managers as the amount of money that people should have set aside by the time they retire. I believe that the reasoning that leads to that figure is along the lines that a 10% yearly return on two million is about $200,000, half of which will be taxed, leaving you with $100,000 in annual disposable income until the day you die. That should be enough for most reasonable people. If you insist on living in a penthouse condo in Monaco in the summer and touring the Caribbean in your yacht in the winter, then two million in assets is not even close to what you need.

Financial managers want you to invest all your money with them; that's how they earn their salaries. The transaction fees on the investments that you make over the years to acquire that two million dollar nest egg is what they are after. I am not saying they don't earn every penny, some do and some don't, but I am saying that it's not necessarily what's best for you.

For one thing, if you follow that thinking to its logical conclusion you will leave behind two million dolars when you die. That money has to be disposed of somehow, and every act in that disposition will generate transaction or service fees for somebody or other. The rest will go to your heirs, if you have any. I don't have kids but I can understand the desire to leave your children something after you die. But is it necessary to leave them that much? You had to work, so why should they be any different? Helping them is one thing, but why spoil them? Working for a living won't do them any harm.

The question is how much money do you really need to stop working early enough so that you can enjoy that wealth while you're still healthy enough to, while at the same not exhausting it too quickly and finding yourself destitute at an age when employment prospects are slim. The ultimate objective is to die on the day that your bank account reaches zero, or maybe even less than zero for that matter.

I am making a basic assumption that you actually want to retire. Many don't. I can fully understand being involved in a task that you love so much that you simply want to continue doing it. Developing a Unified Field Theory in physics, finding a cure for cancer, running a multinational or a country, these are all activities that hold a special attraction and the doing of them is its own reward. There are not many people in jobs like that. Most of the rest of us slog away at some job, which may not be uninteresting at times, but nonetheless fails to hold your attention for 50 or 60 years. Not everyone gets to self-actualize at work.

Some pretend that they want to retire but they don't mean it; they are the ones who have depressions after stopping work and die a year or two later. Insurance companies and the government love those people, you know. To them, an ideal employee is one who works like a dog until the day he/she stops, then dies the next morning at breakfast. They spend 30 years paying premiums into insurance plans and pension funds but then never collect. It's almost enough motivation for them to send out hit men to whack retirees.

Do this. Create a spreadsheet on which you list all your current living expenses and I mean all of them, mortgage/rent, car purchase and maintenance expenses, medical bills, food, vacations, bagels and coffee at Tim Horton's, everything you can think of. Don't skimp; list them all and then some. Then start an income flow starting with $250,000 (yes only a quarter million not two million) assuming it earns about 4%, which is what you can get with a GIC, as conservative as you can be. I did this and discovered that the money would last about eight years. This shocked me because it was much longer than I expected. I then tried supplementing that with $1000 per month in extra income, lower than minimum wage, and discovered that the money would then last nearly 16 years. It may not take as much as you think to retire.

If you are 30 years old, 16 years doesn't seem like very long; you'll be broke at 46. But if you're interested in retirement, odds are that you are much older than 30. Try addding 16 to your age. Will you be collecting a pension anyway by then? Will you be incurring all the expenses that you have now? It is an eye-opening exercise.

I have begun wondering lately about inheritance. So far as I know, we can leave our assets to anyone we want. What about our debts? Can I run up my personal line of credit to its maximum, live the high life just before signing off, leaving behind a will that gives all my liabilities to someone who annoyed the hell out of me? If I am free to leave anyone my assets, why shouldn't I able to saddle them with my debts?

I had supper once with a fellow who has a doctorate in micro-economics. He said that most middle-income people in Canada save more than they really need, have too much insurance, and leave too much money behind when they die. I look around at the teenagers in malls, though, and feel pretty confident that they won't have any trouble spending all that inheritance that's waiting for them. Beat them to it; spend it yourself.

Supply and Demand

2007-07-07T11:12:00.000-04:00

Economists believe that the price of a good or service is related to its availability. They teach this in first year university courses, but I managed to avoid taking economics courses when I was an undergraduate. The basic idea, I think, is that the less there is of something, or at least if enough people believe that there is not much of something, and many people want to have that something, then its price goes up. This seems self-evident but maybe we have just been trained to think it's self-evident.

For the better part of several centuries, shiny baubles were believed to be rare. Diamonds, emeralds, gold, etc. all these things commanded and continue to command high prices because they are supposedly difficult to locate. But there are jewellery stores in every suburban mall and in every shopping district on earth, in bazaars, farmers' markets, office buildings, and some peddlers try to sell the stuff door to door. How rare can this stuff really be when we are surrounded by it everywhere we go? Almost everyone I know, except me, owns several pieces of jewellery. So far as I can tell, shiny jewellery is only slightly less common than pocket lint, and yet the stuff manages to still have a peculiar hold on those who convince themselves that it has special value owing to its scarcity.

I once knew a woman who rejected her fiancé's engagement ring because it was not expensive enough. I am not making this up. She said to him, "Do you expect to keep me with that cheap thing?" or something very similar to that. The poor fellow exchanged it for a more expensive model and took on a second job for a few months to pay for the new ring. How much could she have loved that guy to make him do that? Why all the fuss over some rocks and metal? I thought that was pretty demanding of her. Is that what economists mean by "demand"?

Real estate agents and analysts would like us to believe that housing prices fluctuate because of supply and demand. In 1981 and 1989, real estate prices in Toronto (and elsewhere) collapsed in a very short period of a few months. Prices dropped by 20% to 40%, almost overnight. How it is possible that hundreds of thousands of people simultaneously stopped their house buying frenzy? How could "demand" drop among that many people? They rabidly needed a home two months earlier, enough to drive up prices beyond all reason, then suddenly, poof, one day they didn't need a house anymore. I don't see how "supply and demand" can explain that kind of irrational mass behaviour.

When Microsoft releases a new operating system, thousands of people line up outside stores to buy themselves a copy so they can be among the first to find the bugs. No way can that be a "supply and demand"-driven purchase. You can always make more copies of an operating system, so why doesn't the price go down since there are so many copies of it?

I heard an interview on the radio (or TV) a couple of months ago with a housing contractor in the Calgary area. His main business was home renovation, finishing basements, etc. He said that he was so busy that he was making appointments for 6 months in the future, and that was just to give estimates. This was a major problem for him because he was forced to factor in unpredictable increases in the cost of raw materials in his estimates, something that was not easy to do because of the rapidly changing prices of those materials in the frenzied Alberta construction market. His best guess to actually complete any work was about two years. Listening to that I thought that it was probably more difficult to find a carpenter in Calgary than a CEO, but I bet there aren't any carpenters making $10 million per year there.

There is a cafeteria where I work that sells snacks, a small selection of candy, chocolate bars, chips, and so on. I have an occasional desire for a midafternoon chocolate bar. (I now need to mention product names to make my point. Don't worry, I'm not shilling and manufacturers have not paid me any money to mention their names. This blog entry is not viral marketing. Having said that, if anybody wants to send some cash my way, let me know.) My long time favourites have been KitKat and Aero bars. From what I can tell, they are also the favourites of many others because when they get a shipment of these brands they sell out in 2-3 days. Other bars such as Mars, Caramilk, Oh Henry, etc. stay on the shelves for weeks. They don't frequently restock the shelves with the big sellers so for weeks we have to pick from a selection of chocolate bars that none of us want. Then, every 2 to 3 weeks, they get a delivery of KitKat and Aero, which sell out in 2-3 days. I would think that in a simple self-contained marketplace like our cafeteria, which is by and large free of external market distortions, supply and demand would rule. But it doesn't. It is as if they won't sell us what we want unless we buy out the second-rate inventory first; as if we're not being allowed to eat dessert unless we first finish our peas. If I were running the place I would buy 10 or 20 KitKat or Aero bars for every one of the other brands. It must be obvious to even the dullest sales manager that income drops when chocolate bars that no one wants sit on shelves. You don't need an economist to figure that out.

Watching Over Us

2007-04-16T20:39:00.000-04:00

There is an evangelical temple not far from my home called the New Wine Church. They are in a nondescript building in an older strip mall and share a parking lot with a martial arts school. They have a billboard in their parking lot on which they display witty inspirational messages, and I have attached a photo of one of my favourites. They change the messages every month or two.

At one point, I thought of knocking on their door to interview the person who writes the messages. My idea was to write a freelance article that I could submit to our local community newspaper. Then I found out what community newspapers pay for articles and I abandoned the idea. I don’t mind working for nothing but only when I work for myself.

I sent this photo along with some others to some former friends and colleagues this past weekend, which caused an exchange of emails about god. The correspondence started out a little lowbrow and went downhill from there.

Two weeks ago, Macleans magazine ran a cover story about all the troubles that god and the various different beliefs about god have caused humanity (and the animal kingdom for that matter) through the ages. There are some very vehement critics of religious belief that have recently published books that are attracting considerable attention. I have heard radio interviews with a couple of them and their arguments are compelling.

Naturally, I feel the need to stick my two cents into the discussion so I will describe how I imagine god. (By the way, I will use the masculine pronoun in references to the supreme being for convenience. I don’t presume to understand the functioning of such an entity but it would surprise the hell out of me if he cared much about gender or politically correct grammar.)

In my mind, I picture god in a bar with his buddies. They are sitting in front of a giant television, a state of the art high-definition plasma screen, I figure. They are watching us, we humans, our petty squabbles, our sadistic genocides, and the many cruel results of our childishly arrogant egos and short-term selfish concerns. On the screen is a never-ending line-up of pathetic slobs on daytime television telling spectacularly lurid tales of their repulsive behaviour, politicians stupidly asserting, with a straight face, that god is on their side, babies dieing of curable diseases while millions are spent building casinos where billions will be squandered because of empty-headed boredom. To add to the insult, some of us actually claim to be made in his image; man, that must rankle. It must test his infinite patience not to let loose with well-aimed lightning bolts now and then just to shut us up. What a pleasure it would be to inject a few megawatts into some of these twits. How does he resist? While watching this depressing parade, god’s buddies are laughing up a storm, poking fun at him saying things like, “You created this bunch of losers? Ha! Couldn’t you do better than that?” And God, well, he’s embarrassed of course, and he keeps begging the bartender to change the channel to the hockey game because he wants to watch this Crosby kid from Canada. But his buddies have hidden the remote.

Mark of the Beast

2007-04-15T14:09:00.000-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, Macleans magazine published a review of a book about exorcism. The title of the book is The Vatican’s Exorcists: Driving out the Devil in the 21st Century and it was written by Tracy Wilkinson, an American reporter. According to the book, there are 350 exorcists in Italy, up from only 20 two decades ago, and the Catholic Church cannot keep up with the demand. Naturally enough, you can search for your own demon chaser on the Internet. I wonder what magazines would be good venues for exorcists to advertise in.

The article described one episode from the book about a 45-year-old female dance instructor in Bologna who has a regular visit with her exorcist every Friday morning. She screams, moans, croaks in a demonic male voice, and after it is all over claims to feel 80% better. Eighty percent is not exactly a ringing endorsement and she might want to examine whether or not her exorcist is not in cahoots with Satan. If the devil were fully exorcised, that would end the cash flow, after all, so there is a certain incentive in keeping evil around. The article does not mention fees, but I have to believe that routing the beast cannot be cheap. Our church charged us a $100 (or so) fee when we were married a couple of years ago; wrestling the horned monster is at least as important, I would think.

The previous pope, John Paul 2, was responsible for updating the exorcism ritual in 1999, the first time it had been revised since 1613 according to the Macleans article. It did not say whether this just included the translation from Latin or whether he made other concessions to modernity. But it did say that he personally performed three routings so he was a hands-on kind of guy.

Satan made an appearance on an episode of Dr. Phil a couple of weeks ago. I did not see the episode myself (not having the ability to watch daytime American television), but my wife saw the show. The story concerned a grandfather who had molested his granddaughter. She was 6 or 7 at the time, if I remember correctly. He did not feel so badly about the incident because there was no penile penetration, and somehow in his own mind at least, he had not behaved as badly as he might have. (There is a certain perverse logic in that, I guess.) The little girl did tell her grandmother about what had happened but granny did not take any action, and I cannot remember why not. Maybe the devil told her not to.

Granddad claimed, you see, that the devil had made him do it, but that he had now found the lord and had seen the error of his evil ways. Grandma backs him up, 100%. But what continues to perplex these two knuckle draggers is why their daughter-in-law refuses to let them near their granddaughter. They cannot understand her obstinacy. After all, the old letch is cured now; Satan left the building. I do not know what their son, the father of the little girl in question, thought about all this. Apparently Dr. Phil had him sitting in a control room listening to his father’s admissions but I did not find out his eventual reaction. I hate programs like this because I am a firm believer in intellectual osmosis, and I hate associating with or listening to wackos because I am always afraid that some of what ails them may rub off in some way or other.

I did not see the famous Exorcist movie when it first came out (in the mid 1970s) but I remember a good friend of mine at the time telling me that he had to sleep with a light on the night he saw the movie. We were 19 or 20 at the time, so this was a significant admission. I have forgotten the name of the young actress who played the possessed character in the film but I do not think that she had much of a career after that. She was in a couple of women-in-prison flicks, not good career moves. But time was even less kind to Satan. He went from the Hollywood big time to an afternoon talk show, teamed up with white trash child molesters. He needs a branding makeover real bad and these Italian exorcists might be just what the devil needs.

Company Time

2007-02-18T14:38:00.000-05:00

Currently, there is a municipal budget debate taking place here in Ottawa. The new mayor and council want to maintain a zero percent tax increase and the deficit amount of $95 million (CAN) keeps surfacing in media reports. No one expects to pay the same for petrol as they did last year and no one expects to pay the same for a shirt as in 1994 so why do people expect taxes to remain constant when cities are growing larger all the time and when more and more demands are being placed on them? You can’t outsource garbage removal to India; you can’t wait for the Hong Kong fire department to show up when your kitchen is in flames. The federal and provincial governments can download services if they want to, but somebody has to buy a plow, put in on the front of their truck, and drive up and down the streets after a snowstorm, and that person expects to be paid.

The budget figure of $95 million (CAN) was dwarfed by the reported $210 million (USD) that the ex-CEO of Home Depot, Robert L. Nardelli, received last month when his tenure ended after six years. The severance package was over and above the reported accumulated $120 million in salary and benefits that he received over his six years employment. One person’s severance could solve, more than twice over, an entire city’s budget woes. It’s difficult not to be awed by that.

That severance amounts to $6000 per day over his 6-year term. And remember, that’s over and above his salary.

After starting on the job with a bang, Nardelli fortunes seemed to have turned sour in the last couple of years, according to the media reports. The press never seems to go into much detail, and I find that the business press is more “cheerleader” than “investigator”, closer to the sports pages than anything else. But the one thing they do mention is his early cost cutting. It’s trivially easy to make the bottom line look good when companies lay people off. Since they are paying less in salaries, well, that leaves more money in the company coffers. You don’t need an M.B.A. to understand that. You don’t need to give someone $6000 per day for that advice.

Please don’t misunderstand. I am not trying to blacken Nardelli’s reputation. (And who would listen to me if I tried?) If anything, I respect what he did. I know that he probably negotiated that exit severance before being hired. Is it his fault that the bunch on the other side of the table agreed to the terms? He gave it a shot and won. Good for him. Could the shareholders of that company have been equally served by a CEO earning $600 per day instead of $6000. Maybe. We’ll never know. They probably didn’t interview any $600 per day people and that’s not Nardelli’s problem.

An old friend of mine is known for his colourful turns of phrase. In a conversation once, apropos of nothing, he mentioned that he loved having a bowel movement on company time. Somehow, the thought that his employer was paying him money while he sat on a toilet seat cheered him up. I can’t help it; I know it’s low humour; I know it’s adolescent; but it’s funny. I wish it didn’t happen but I can’t help occasionally remembering that conversation when I am occupied in that manner. I have managed to not laugh out loud in a public toilet when thinking about it but it’s been a close thing a few times. I am reminded of my friend’s line when I see people go into company washrooms with newspapers and magazines. It’s interesting to work out how much money one makes during that reading break.

Six thousand dollars per day comes to $500 per hour based on a 12-hour day. I use a 12-hour day for my calculation because at that income the guy had better be putting in 12-hour days. In fact, if I were paying a guy $6000 to run my company and I heard that he was spending quality time with his wife and kids or that he was thinking of booking vacation time, I can tell you that it would count against him big time at his annual performance review. I had better not catch the guy surfing for deals on eBay at his desk, I can tell you that.

I read a quote from a financial analyst who basically said that no shareholder would complain about Nardelli’s renumeration if profits were up and they were pocketing tons of cash. I have heard similar arguments in the past. To paraphrase, who cares what a CEO costs so long as he delivers. I suppose a lot of people feel that way. Funny how you never hear anyone say the same about welders, mechanics, or computer programmers. The argument is nonsensical. Were the shareholders ever given the chance to hire a guy for $600 per day that could have delivered the same result? Did they ever get the choice?

If I were paying somebody $6000 per day to run my company, I would be tempted to spring for another hundred or two on a private investigator to stand outside the guy’s toilet with a stopwatch.

Questions for the Man

2007-01-08T20:34:00.000-05:00

A childhood friend and I shared a running gag throughout most of our lives about how we were saving up life's most difficult questions for the old man on the hill when our time came to visit him (please forgive the gender non-neutrality but putting it any other way sounds inane). Going up the hill was our euphemism for bowing out, the final curtain, kicking the bucket, i.e., dieing.

Life's big questions were on my list, of course, and still are for that matter. They are on everyone's lists. Scientists and philosophers have thought about the big questions for centuries. But more mundane questions made it onto our lists from time to time too.

When Cadbury's was running those television ads about how to get the caramel in their Caramilk bars, we used that as an example of one of the questions that we would ask the old man on the hill. Years ago, a cousin of mine went on a tour of a Cadbury's factory and he told me how they do it, so it is not a mystery anymore. (If you didn't know, they manufacture the bars upside down and place frozen chunks of caramel in the chocolate hollows before pouring the chocolate backing onto the bar. Freezing the caramel prevents it from oozing out on contact with the warm poured chocolate backing. I hope I didn't ruin the mystery for you.)

I was intensely curious about relativity and studied physics for years largely because of that interest. Relativity was one hell of a trip for the mind, but I am still not sure that I truly did understand it. For a while there, however, I thought I did and that felt great.

A big mystery throughout most of my life has been automatic transmissions. To this day I still don't know how they work. I understand the concept, but I have never seen one dismantled and I don't know how a torque converter really does what it does. I was hoping to figure this one out on my own but now that I finally bought a car with an automatic transmission the mystery has oddly gone out of it. It must be the daily familiarity. This must be the feeling that men get after being married for a long time. They think they are beginning to understand women. That too may be an illusion.

For years I was curious about computers, both the hardware and software. I wanted to know what made them tick. While studying physics and electronics I ended up understanding something about the hardware and after 25 years of writing software of various kinds for a living I now know all I want to about software. All I want now is for my computer to fetch my email and not get infected by a virus.

What has been puzzling me lately is a couple of things related to computers and the internet. Open software is a huge mystery to me. So far as I understand it, people sit at home writing complex computer programs, debug them, rewrite them, and then finally give them away for free. I don't understand that at all. Do they think they are on a mission from god? Who works for free? Were there machinists and millwrights 100 years ago who got together in the evenings and built stuff that they gave away to corporations gratis? I somehow doubt it.

Just recently, Google bought YouTube for a lot of money. But YouTube is just a website where people show their home movies. People make the movies for free; they place them on the website for free; then other people watch them for free. But the people who owned YouTube got obscenely rich by selling the web site to Google. Is it just me or are all those people nuts? I am going to have to ask the old man about that one.

(It occurs to me that you could ask why I write this blog for free. Simple. No one has offered to pay me yet. If you, kind reader, knows someone that is willing to pay me for this, please let me know.)

There are loads of other questions that I have saved up for the old man on the hill, a lot of them to do with why people behave the way they do at work or in their private lives. That behaviour is a never-ending mystery. It is also wildly entertaining so I am having some good laughs in the meantime. That friend of mine who shared this running gag with me died a few years ago of one of those diseases that they cannot do anything about. I hope the old man answered his questions.

It's Only a Matter of Time

2006-12-11T20:33:00.000-05:00

I have not often been ahead of my time. I was among the first to buy a VCR and jumped onto the CD bandwagon early, but that may be about it. The operating system I use on my computer was released in the year 2000, I haven't bought a new suit in 6 years, and I still own and wear some shirts that were bought in the late 80's. I am not a trendy guy. My current car does not have power-operated door locks; I use a key to unlock my car door.

Occasionally though, I have an idea whose time has not yet come but I am typically never in a position to act on it. As soon as I saw teenagers mutilating their bodies in large numbers with comically repulsive tattoos, the first thing that I thought of was what a booming market there would be in tattoo removal in 20-30 years. However, it was too late for me to go to medical school to learn to be a dermatologist. Kids, listen to me, it will be a gold mine.

Many years ago I attended a Halloween party that doubled as a divorce celebration. A fellow I knew at the time had his divorce papers come through, and it had been a long time coming. It was a sideline to an evening that primarily consisted of adults dressing up in various costumes to look like idiots. I believe I brought a paper bag to wear over my head but I have forgotten what the joke was supposed to be. Someone rented a gorilla suit and she sweated buckets under that fake itchy fur.

The other reason for the party has remained with me. Estimates are that 50% of marriages end in divorce. This means that for every married couple breaking up, there are two potential parties that could be catered, photographed, videotaped, ritualized or immortalized in some way. This is a market screaming for attention and everyone is missing it.

One obvious problem with divorce is that there is no generally accepted societal ritual to hang a party on. With weddings it's built right in: the marriage ceremony. For an hour or so everyone has to remain solemn and serious, a tall order for a large portion of humanity, so having a big party afterward to let loose seems predestined. Unfortunately, with divorce all that happens is that a court officer mails you some papers. It's difficult to imagine using that as a basis for a bash. But that is so shortsighted.

Another aspect of divorce is that it's been traditionally viewed as a bad thing, a symbol of failure, the end of something, maybe even the end of something good. There are lots of people who view divorce this way. And they are all so wrong.

By the time the former loving couple starts negotiating how to split up the cutlery and snow shovels, the worst is already over. They have already lived through the years of not wanting to be with the other's family at the holidays, have spent nights wishing that they could go out on a date with someone interesting, prayed that they could get laid more than twice per year without having to throw a tempter tantrum. By the time the two of them are in their lawyers' offices trying to speed things up because the sharks are charging more per hour that you or I can ever hope to earn, the bad part is over. At that moment, the couple is just two signatures away from the best thing that's happened in a decade. To wallow in misery at that point is just stupid. Just stupid. That is the perfect time for a party.

Once that concept permeates the popular culture, the rest will come naturally. We live in a marketing based society and it won't be long before rituals are invented for the occasion, and more importantly, the paid services to help provide those rituals. After all, we did it for funereals. Is there anything more private than the death of a loved one? Is that really a time for doling out thousands of dollars to people you've never met to do basically nothing except take you for a drive in a black Cadillac station wagon? Marketing genius turned soul-wrenching death rituals into a moneymaking bonanza; charging a few bucks for a divorce party seems like small potatoes in comparison.

There are halls to rent, divorce consultants to consult, there is food to buy, booze to guzzle. There are photographers to hire and photo albums to buy; why wouldn't people want photographic mementoes of what could turn out to be one of the best things they've ever done? The best part is that they don't even have to invite all the in-laws that they could never stand because they are all at their own party just down the street.

I see nothing but upside. And so, I suspect that somewhere in the world, in a place that's much trendier than where I hang out, someone is already doing this. And, as usual, I am too late. But it's still a good idea.

Deadbeats

2006-12-04T20:08:00.000-05:00

Two weeks ago last Friday we listened to an automated recording of a man's voice on our answering when we arrived home after work. The message asked us to call an 800 number and that it was a very important call. It did not say who was calling nor why, so I deleted the message. On the following Monday the same message was on the machine again, but this time there was a second message from a live female voice, saying basically the same thing but that left a local Ottawa number. She also did not say who she was or what she was calling about. I wanted to delete those two messages too as I don't believe in answering anonymous calls, but my wife returned the call.

It turned out to be a collection agency that claimed that we owed them $45 from a two-year-old invoice. They asked for a credit card payment. My immediate reaction was that it was telephone fraud and I made hand signals to my wife to hang up so we could call the police. But she asked a few more questions and the lady said that the original invoice was from a local hospital for ambulance services. My wife had in fact been taken by ambulance with stomach cramps to that hospital about two years earlier but we had never received any invoices from them.

My wife probed a little more and discovered that the hospital had the correct telephone number, postal code and house number but had the wrong street name. This was very odd because she had handed over her driving license to the admitting nurse to be certain to get it right. The lady from the collection agency then suggested that we could clear the whole thing up by just paying by credit card. My wife refused saying that she wanted to have written proof before she paid anything. The collection lady answered that she would fax us the info as soon as we paid. That sounded fishy to me. My wife stuck to her guns and the lady agreed to mail us an invoice.

The next day, Tuesday, there were two more messages on the machine, an automated one and another message from the very same woman. My wife called immediately and the lady started off complaining that they hadn't received payment yet. My wife asked how could you have, since it's only been 24 hours and we haven't received the invoice yet. The lady repeated the request for a credit card payment and my wife simply refused.

On Wednesday, we had another automated message but none from the lady so we ignored it thinking that their computer was simply programmed to keep calling until someone clicked the right icon. But on Thursday, we had 2 messages waiting, an automated one and a call from our collection lady friend. We also had not received an invoice yet. My wife called her only to be harassed again for not having paid. Then she proceeded to have the same conversation as on Tuesday with the lady suggesting that we were lying about not receiving the invoice and asking for a credit card payment again. She said she'd send another invoice. We wondered if they were sending them to the wrong address too, even though we had given the collection agency the correct address by then.

We ignored the automated message on Friday evening and had not received any invoice in the mail. It does not take 4 business days to send mail from one Ottawa address to another and I assumed that they had simply been lying about sending us an invoice.

On the following Monday, we had still not received an invoice but had two phone messages again, an automated one and another from our collection agency lady. My wife called her and had a repeat conversation about invoices and credit cards. Then my wife said that she was sick of all this and asked for their address so we could drop by in person the next day and pay the amount, once we were shown an invoice. The lady gave us an address but had trouble coming up with the closest cross street, as if she had never been to that office, which seemed a little odd, but it's possible that she just worked out of her home and had never been to that office.

As we drove into town the next morning, I made mental plans to pay only in cash and to check with both the city and provincial police before going to the collection agency. But I decided to telephone the hospital first, something we should probably have done a week earlier. It took three tries through one of those voicemail labyrinths but I finally found someone in accounting at her desk. I gave her an address correction and asked if they had been trying to mail us anything. She mentioned the invoice and so I told her about the collection agency. She calmly explained that the invoice mailings were probably being returned by the post office and that after two years, they had referred the debt to a collection agency. I asked why they never phoned us, that we could cleared the whole thing up a long time ago and they would have received their money sooner. She answered that they don't do that. I was at a loss for something to say so I didn't say anything. Then she added, would I like to pay the bill now? But don't we need to pay the collection agency at this point, I asked. Oh no, she replied, you can pay me and I will phone them. So I did. We received a receipt from the hospital the very next day and the collection agencies phone calls have stopped. I suspect that the collection agency lady didn't receive her commission for that one.

We have never received an invoice from the collection agency.

That day two years ago, when my wife had stomach cramps, we spent 11 hours in a freezing emergency room, 5 hours before being seen by anyone, and 6 more hours with her in a back room and me watching television in the reception area. She continued to have bad cramps, vomited while being warned by a nurse not to spill any onto the bed or floor. No doctor saw her and no treatment was provided, although they did take blood for tests. We went home shortly before midnight wondering what had just happened. A couple of months after that, during an appointment with her specialist, she listened to him arguing over the phone with the emergency room staff because they would not give him details of her treatment there. But I'm her doctor, he screamed, and ended up slamming the phone down in disgust. I don't think he ever received the results of those blood tests. He scheduled her for a procedure where they send a camera down her throat to check on all the various passages in her digestive tract. She has never received any definitive results from that procedure from either the specialist, or the surgeon, or her family doctor. But I am sure that they all got paid.

My advice is this. Don't get sick. If you do, don't go to a hospital. They can stitch cuts and plaster broken limbs, but beyond that you're on our own, unless you're a professional hockey player. If you're a pro athlete, you can get an MRI within a couple of hours for a sprained ankle and the team will cover the ambulance fee. No lost invoices.

The system doesn't work.

No More Pictures

2006-10-23T19:48:00.000-04:00

(This may not mean much to non-Canadian readers.)

When Preston Manning started up the grass roots Reform party, the precursor of the current Conservative party, I liked the guy. The main reason is that one of the fundamental policy platforms of the early Reform movement was that government should stop subsidizing business. The basic idea was that if a business could not survive on its own, taxpayers should not save it. It was a radical idea, especially for a so-called right-wing party, who generally fall over backwards to hand over our cash to their corporate benefactors. For all their tough talk about global competition, efficiency and hard work, large corporations have never been shy about feeding at the public trough. If you have ever worked at a large corporation, you will know how silly it is to use the word efficient in the context.

Manning was (and probably is) a social conservative, a position with which I have little sympathy. If you do not want to engage in sex before marriage and if you do not want to participate in gay sex, then don't. Simple as that. I believe that former Prime Minister Trudeau said it best when he pronounced that government has NO place in the bedrooms of the nation. It is none of my business what you do in the privacy of your own home. And, in perfect symmetry, what I do in my home is none of your business either.

So, although Manning seemed to represent a social conservative movement that wanted to interfere in my private life, that didn't bother me much because Canada is not the West Virginia bible belt and we would not tolerate politicians sticking their sanctimonious noses in our personal lives. Since staying in office supersedes all other considerations, there is no chance that a politician would ever actually act on such principles. At the time, I thought it would be an interesting spectacle to watch a party that aligned itself with the so-called right wing, whatever that means anymore, try to peddle a public policy that tried to eliminate public support of private businesses. Predictably, that policy did not survive. The corporate snouts are back at the trough, snorting away.

A few weeks ago in Macleans magazine, there was an article about how the premier of Newfoundland, Danny Williams, plans to deal with the big oil companies in their efforts to extract oil out of the waters off Newfoundland's east coast. According to the article, one of the big oil partners came asking for tax concessions and threatened to leave the drilling consortium if Newfoundland did not cough up some freebies. Williams was not sympathetic. But out west in the Alberta oil patch, the provincial and federal governments are subsidizing big oil, despite the promise of huge future oil sands profits.

Why do we need to help out big oil? Is oil exploration and production a moribund industry? Is there no future in petroleum? Are the poor guys hard up for profits? It seems to me that we have this backwards. The oil is in our ground. The big oil companies should be on their knees begging us to let them dig it up. They ought to be competing with each other for the privilege. Instead, governments are cozying up to the oil boys with offers of tax concessions and subsidies. How could we get this so wrong?

The Conservative federal government made some cost-saving announcements ago a couple of weeks ago. Among them was the cancellation of the National Portrait Gallery. National Archives of Canada had plans underway to move their collection of historical portraits from the current location in the old archives building into another location down the road on Wellington Street here in Ottawa, across from Parliament Hill. The future site, a beautiful older building, has had a construction fence around it for as long as I have been living here (about 4 years) with signs announcing its new use. I do not know how much money was tied up in the project nor how much the government claims to be saving.

If our government thinks that it is a good idea to give some of my money (and yours) to big oil corporations to give them a helping hand, then closing down a project to house historic portraits in order to save money seems ridiculous to me.

Advice for Wives

2006-10-17T22:10:00.000-04:00

Throughout my adult life, I have occasionally come across a certain kind of wife that I will call a “mother-nagger”. By that, I mean someone that treats their husband as if he were an errant immature child and not an adult in his own right. I am sure that most of you have encountered the type too. She will nag her husband to go clean himself up when he comes in from having raked leaves for 10 hours, when all he just wants to do is sit down for a minute to catch his breath. She will constantly remind him of all the little jobs that need doing around the house the way you constantly have to nag children into doing their homework. When in the company of others, especially in the company of others, she will often refer to her husband as just another one of her children. For example, if a couple has 3 children, she will tell others that she has to put up with four kids at home, the implication being that the husband is just another one of the kids.

This behaviour is wrong on several levels and this blog entry is just my way of trying to help any ladies out there that behave this way. I will address you lady readers directly (if there are any) and try to explain why you should not act this way. (I should add, at this point, that I have thankfully managed to avoid this particular plague in my relationships.)

First, it is condescending. In virtually all of the cases that I have personal experience with, the husband is a decent guy. He had held down a good job for years. He is respected by his friends and colleagues. He pays taxes, earned university degrees or has built up a business. In short he is a reasonably successful adult male. So, it’s just not plausible that he is as much of a doofus as the wife asserts. And the thing is, you see, he knows this. He knows he is not a loser. He has plenty of evidence. The inevitable result is that he will simply stop listening to what the wife has to say. No one likes to be treated like an idiot, especially someone who isn’t one.

Don’t misunderstand me. I know full well that there are loads of immature louts out there. There was a 1996 chick flick I saw entitled Beautiful Girls. Among other things, the plot involved two gorgeous small town ladies in their early 20’s who were dating two of the sorriest twits one could ever meet. The story was about, in part, how the guys matured to finally realize how superior these two women actually were and how lucky the two guys were to be with them. At least, I think that was what the filmmakers wanted me to think about the movie. What I actually thought was how stupid these two airhead babes must be to have stayed with those two mouth-breathers for as long as they did. And that’s the second point I want to make about “mother-naggers”. If the guy that you are married to actually is as big an innocent as you claim and that he really merits all your ridicule, well, that says more about you than it does about him.

The third and probably most important reason to not be a “mother-nagger” is only slightly subtler. Most men, you see, are not sexually attracted to their mothers. There are men that are sexually attracted to their mothers, but they are either already in prison serving time as serial killers or are on an FBI watch list. If you happen to be married to one of those, this blog will not help you. If you insist on treating your husband as if he were a child and continue to persistently do so for years, the way his mother did when he was a misbehaved kid, then somewhere in his mind you will become a second mother to him. Ladies, we all had a mother and we do not need another and we certainly do not want to be intimate with our mother. Once you become a second mother, no mail order ruby-red lingerie will have the effect it once did. If your aim is to avoid having sex with your husband, then keep treating him like a child.

I can hear some of you now, however, “But my husband really is just a big kid!” If you find yourself saying that as you read these words, do this: Minimize this window, go take a nap and reread this blog later when you are more alert. And this time, pay attention.

Armed and Dangerous

2006-10-12T20:33:00.000-04:00

Two or three days after hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc in New Orleans, I heard a radio report about a guy there who shot his sister in the head. He used a pistol. According to the report, they were fighting over a bottle of water. It's never a good idea to speculate, but my guess is that those siblings were not raised in the most loving of families. Although he was a gun purchaser, he is probably not a poster boy for responsible firearms use that the gun lobby would like to have on their side. I suppose that the gun lobby would argue that if the sister had been packing, she could have killed him first.

I spent a little time reading some web sites by the various arms of the gun lobby; most of the sites are American, reflecting that country's fascination with guns. Some of the sites are way out there. They go as far as to say that if people owned and used more guns, there would be a lot less crime in the US. They quote statistics that claim to show that gun owners suffer fewer criminal assaults and are better able to defend themselves when the assaults do take place. It's a funny thing that, because there are all kinds of safe places all over the world where hardly anyone owns firearms. How do they manage it?

In recent weeks, several mental deficients have attacked schools throughout North America. The fellow who shot students at Dawson College in Montreal owned an assault rifle and played web-based Super Columbine computer games. (I wonder if any kids from Columbine play the Super Columbine game.) Wasn't that gunman's family suspicious that he felt the need to own an assault rifle?

I wonder how much advertising of firearms takes place on Columbine-type gaming web sites. They must be a natural place for gun vendors to hang out. It's a perfect target market.

There was an attempted school shooting in Missouri earlier this week. A 13-year old student entered a school and fired a shot into the ceiling; then his Mac-90 jammed. The Mac-90 is a military assault rifle, somewhat akin to an AK-47, according to an online newspaper report I saw. He ran away but the police were able to catch him. Since his gun was not working properly he was probably easy to take down. Some people are alive in Missouri today because of that random equipment failure and I wonder if that will put a dent in the sales of Mac-90's. I mean, if you can't rely on an assault rifle to function properly in a school, what good is it in a street shoot-out or at a bank heist?

Why does a teenager in Missouri need to own a military assault rifle? Who could possibly think that is a good idea?

On one web site that I looked at, they reported that 59 million handguns were manufactured in the US from 1972 to 1997. There are only 300 million Americans. How can they possibly need that many handguns? Except for police and some specialized security forces, why does anyone need a handgun? Have we all gone mad?

I heard an interview yesterday evening with a Congressman from Wisconsin. He is proposing putting firearms in schools. His idea is that the guns would be stored in a safe place but that teachers and principals would have access to them if the need arose. According to him, there are safes nowadays that can be programmed to open by thumbprint; you can program some models to respond to up to 5 different thumbs. He sounded really keen about those safes. He figures that in a large city school there will probably be a few teachers who are trained to shoot. When a crazed web-gamer shows up with a Mac-90 that works properly and starts to shoot the place up, one of those gun-trained teachers can rush to the gun safe, load up and chase after the nutcase. (I am not making this up. This was from a radio interview on CBC One, during the highly regarded program As It Happens.)

I heard on today's news that US President Bush has convened a school-shooting summit. I feel better already. This is what I predict they will discover, 1) guns don't kill people; people do and 2) society is to blame.

Maybe in the future they will staff classrooms with class marshals, the way that they have air marshals on airplanes. Of course, most of the school-shooters end up committing suicide or arrange it so that they themselves get fatally shot, so I don't see how having an effective armed response will deter them. The promise of a shoot-out probably increases the thrill for the twerps.

Why don't crazed gunmen ever attack the headquarters of street gangs? Why don't they ever machine-gun down a meeting of organized crime leaders? You would think that, by now, given the number of guns in the US and the spate of corporate meltdowns such as Enron, Worldcomm and others, that some lunatic would have tried to mow down a boardroom full of arrogant marketing VP's. How come no nutcase has ever tried a suicide attack on a terrorist training camp? You never hear about anything like that.

The saddest case, to me, was that fellow who executed some Amish schoolgirls. I bet that the Amish community feels so much safer being surrounded by all those people who carry weapons. The Amish reject many, if not most, of the trappings of modern society. Maybe they have a point.

The General

2006-10-01T16:06:00.000-04:00

About a month ago, there was an article in the Ottawa Citizen about the plans that General Motors has for saving itself from oblivion. I saw what was basically the same article in other newspapers as well and so I think it was probably more press release than news story.

The amount, $1 billion dollars, was in the headline. Honestly, I can’t remember if this was the amount that they were going to have to spend on certain programs to save the company or if it was the amount that they were going to save by adopting those programs. I was eating a chocolate bar at the time on a sunny Friday afternoon in front of the large picture windows in our cafeteria and it was mightily difficult to concentrate.

I remember that the article mentioned, among other things, the worldwide consolidation of their midsize platform that was going to help them save costs big time. This must be the 5th or 6th world car project that I have heard about since beginning to pay attention to the car industry 30-35 years ago. You would think that they would have one by now.

There was a lot of talk about labour costs, pension costs, rising health costs for their retirees, and that there is a real risk that those retirees will lose large chunks of those health and pension benefits in the next few years. The implication is always that the hungry unions are not helping much, an old refrain. The ever-changing tastes of the automobile buying public were also brought up, that the GM model line-up has not kept up with the times.

During the 30-35 years that GM has seen their North American market share decrease from 50% to 25%, Toyota, Nissan, Honda, BMW, Daimler, Suzuki and probably others have managed to open and operate plants in the US, the home of high labour costs. How can this be? It doesn’t add up, does it?

How come, in those 30-35 years, that it never occurred to the management at GM to do the one thing that might save them, the one thing that they are actually in business for? That is, build a good car. Was that so difficult to figure out? Others did.

Just once, in one of these state-of-the-corporation addresses, I would like to hear someone say that the reason that the company is tanking is because of a long legacy of bad decision-making by management. Just once, I would like to hear that that a long line of arrogant incompetent nitwit VP’s and CEO’s was going to have to give their performance bonuses back to prop up the pension plans.

Extended hiatus

2006-09-14T19:33:00.000-04:00

I would like to apologize to my semiregular readers for the recent period of inactivity on this blog. My wife recently had a large art exhibit and we have been busy as can be for the past couple of months preparing for it. During that time, I became a frame maker armed with my laser-guided mitre saw and fancy $100 dollar saw blade. It only took 4 attempts before producing a frame that was not an embarassment. And modern glues are amazing.

However, I have been making notes on many blog ideas and I have quite a backlog of topics to cover. Stay tuned.

Working Songs

2006-07-16T09:17:00.000-04:00

There is a terrific working song called Erie Canal on a recent Bruce Springsteen CD. The CD is a tribute album to the old time folkie, Pete Seeger. (Younger readers, if there are any, may have to “google” Pete Seeger.) That particular song was written in 1905 by Thomas S. Allen. The song is about a guy who, along with his mule Sal, makes his living pulling barges along the Erie Canal between Albany and Buffalo. Listen to the song. It’s a tribute to honest work and an extinct way of life, has a nice rhythm and a catchy repeated verse.

If you ever get the chance to visit Upper Canada Village near Morrisburg, Ontario, there is a working exhibit of such a barge-pulling system there. They have constructed, or restored, a short canal with a horse trail on its shore. The horse is harnessed to a barge and pulls it from one from area to another, loaded with whatever needs hauling, such as logs, wool, food or tourists.

I have listened to the Erie Canal tune quite a bit lately on the way to work in the mornings. It makes me wonder what memorable songs will come out of our computer-based office cubicle culture. Will our great-grand children be listening to verses like this,

I sat down in my cubicle
Rebooted my computer
Read my 67 emails
And replied to some
Oh baby, I have the cubicle farm blues.

Not very inspirational, is it? Sorry, best I could do. See what you can come up with.

The only mule in a cubicle-farm song will be the two-legged one writing the lyrics. Maybe the synonym for donkey, i.e., ass, is a more apt description.

It was a rugged life walking along the shore of a canal all day with a horse, or mule, pulling a barge laden with coal or flour. But it was honest work, people depended on you, and at the end of your working life, you could say to yourself that you did something useful for someone.

Nowadays, there are legion who sit in cubicles for years writing modifications to software, whose only purpose is to shave a tenth of a penny off the cost of a transaction so that a client can fire a few minimum-wage call-centre flunkies, saving the company a few dollars and earning the CEO his performance bonus of $8 million, a few months before he jumps ship to another company to loot their bank account.

Now there’s a legacy to be proud of. Do you think they’ll write many working songs about our jobs?

Tim, where are you?

2006-07-16T08:45:00.000-04:00

(This entry may not mean much to non-Canadian readers. My apologies.)

I have recently made a couple of trips to Mont-Tremblant from home, via a ferry crossing east of Ottawa. The route then uses highway 148 on the Québec side, i.e., on the north shore of the Ottawa river, turning north onto highway 323 at Montebello, following that all the way to St.Jovite, or as it is known after amalgamation, downtown Mont-Tremblant. It is approximately a two-hour drive, some of it scenic.

There are no Tim Horton donut shops along this route. I would have thought that this was in contravention of either a federal or provincial statute. How can I be expected to drive for two hours without access to a toasted bagel or small regular? These days, the Tim’s coffee chain is part of a large food service corporation, I believe. This means that there is a small army of highly paid men and women in expensive suits in an office somewhere who are to blame for this. Come on, guys, stop showing Power Point presentations to each other and do something about this.

Al Fresco

2006-07-11T21:25:00.000-04:00

There are lots of things that I don’t completely understand. Naturism, or nudism as it used to be called, is one of them. I understand the part about wanting to be naked outside. By and large we live our public lives with our clothes on and very few of us ever have the experience of being completely nude out of doors. It might be fun to let the sun shine “where the sun don’t shine”.

Being naked with a bunch of strangers doesn’t appeal to me, though. Maybe it’s because I grew up with the term nudist colony, which is a little too reminiscent of penal colony or leper colony. It just doesn’t sound inviting. Now that they are called naturist resorts, the experience sounds more like a visit to a spa or a holiday weekend. No matter what you call them, however, they are still public gatherings of naked people. The concept leaves me uneasy.

Aficionados of nude culture claim that it is a perfectly normal activity and that it is a healthy way to live, both physically and spiritually. It’s tempting to want to agree with that; it sounds so appealing. The trouble is that billions of human beings spend their entire public adult lives with their clothes on. This is true across almost all the world’s cultures. And it has been true for countless generations. It’s difficult to make the case that it is normal for us to be naked together in public, when almost no one does so. So far as I can tell, public nudity is a fringe activity. I use the term, fringe, in a statistical sense; it is not a value judgment. Fringe activities are, almost by definition, not normal.

As to whether it’s a healthier lifestyle, I suppose that, insofar as public nudity encourages one to spend time outside playing volleyball or hiking, then it could be part of a healthy active life. It’s tough to manage that during a Canadian winter, though. Whether it’s spiritually healthy to be socially naked with others, I can’t honestly say.

Many years ago, in a newspaper article about a naturist resort, the reporter noticed that the washrooms in the place did not have separating walls or doors. The latrines were communal. Apparently, this was in keeping with the natural theme of the place. Since it is a perfectly natural bodily function, there is no need for privacy when evacuating. That would be a tough one for me to accept.

All I have ever read or heard about naturism leads me to believe that erotic interest is forbidden in the lifestyle. I can understand that the people involved might want to avoid unwanted harassment of that kind. However, there seems to be an inherent contradiction with that policy, it seems to me. If it’s natural and healthy to have a coffee and a chat with naked strangers, and if it’s natural and healthy to sit next to them while emptying bowels, then why deny the perfectly natural impulse to become horny when standing around naked together?

When I have spoken about this erotic aspect with former or current practitioners, I have usually gotten a very interesting reaction. It’s not fair to generalize, of course, but my questions about the sexual aspects are often met with condescending sanctimony. That sounds harsh, I know, but that’s been my experience. I admit to having a low tolerance for arrogant people who act a little too smug, so maybe it’s just me. But I resent being told that it is adolescent to become interested in sex just because there are naked women around. That somehow, if I were mature enough, that wouldn’t happen.

(Before I go on, I am using as example the case where a group of naked females has an erotic effect on me simply because this is a personal opinion piece and I approach the issue from a male hetero point of view. The discussion readily extends to other paradigms.)

My main problem with this attempt to deny the presence of sexual desire is the following. I don’t doubt that it is possible to condition yourself to not get horny when provoked by the presence of nude people. But why would you? I like it that the sight of naked women makes my heart pump a little harder and that I get a little tense. Those reactions are fun. I enjoy them. I don’t want to condition myself out of experiencing them. Why would anyone want to do that, assuming that they’re sane, that is? How, exactly, is my life better if I stop getting turned on by the sight of naked women? What’s the benefit to me?

I won’t be visiting a naturist resort anytime soon. Aside from not having any particular interest in the lifestyle, the possibility of an open-door communal toilet is enough to keep me away.

What was it all about, then?

2006-06-25T21:37:00.000-04:00

Many years ago I used to subscribe to The American Spectator, a magazine at the vanguard of the American neo-conservative movement. Its articles were long and thoughtful and concerned themselves with political and social issues of the day with a very prominent section of literary review as well. In those days, many of the ideals of the old left had gone haywire, with radicalized opinion taking the place of common sense. Many of the new challenging ideas coming out of the right were first presented in its pages and it was very much a publication of social debate. In later years it became a knee-jerk partisan champion of any issue that the U.S. Republican Party adopted and I lost interest. It irritated me that their editors believed that fiscal conservatism went hand in hand with social conservatism, a point of view that I never comprehended. Why can’t one believe in abortion rights while still wanting to limit government interference in things it can’t do well? By and large it was a good read, if a little apologetic about and too gung ho towards things American.

I distinctly remember a review article about the Vietnam War, which had been long over by the time the article appeared. The writer, (sorry, can’t remember who) analysed the war from three points of view, strategic, tactical and moral. He maintained that the moral reasons for entering the fight remained valid, in his view, but that, strategically, it was probably not worth bothering with. The argument went something like this (and I am writing from memory here): it was the correct moral choice to rescue the Vietnamese people from communism but the benefits weren’t worth the cost. Tactically though, it was a complete fiasco, of which there remains little doubt in the minds of the sane.

In the June 19th, 2006 edition of Maclean’s magazine, there is an article about how the current U.S. administration is making moves towards a rapprochement with Vietnam. This includes military cooperation. The speculation is that the U.S. wants a military presence very close to China. The British journalist, Robert Fisk, has pointed out in his writing and public speaking that new U.S. military bases have been emerging throughout the world, in such a way as to encircle China. One of Fisk’s points about this strategy is who the U.S. is making friends with to accomplish this. They don’t have a really good track record when choosing which dictators to prop up. Saddam, for instance, really backfired for them.

According to Macleans, Rumsfeld took a little trip to the other side of the world to make nice-nice with a communist Vietnamese government. It’s still communist, last I heard. They had quotes from him about how industrious the Vietnamese are. Funny, because I thought that communism bred laziness and waste. It sure seemed to in a lot of other places. But Rumsfeld should not be too surprised about how hard working the Vietnamese are, because he was around at the time of the Vietnam War, in the Nixon administration. You would think that he’d remember the Ho Chi Ming trail, then. Big job it was, building and maintaining that. He went on to say that helping erstwhile foes has been a successful part of U.S. foreign policy in the past. I guess that means there’s a bright future in store for Iraqis.

So, the U.S. went to war in Vietnam to save people from communism. (There’s lots of folks in Eastern Europe who could have used that attention too, and a lot sooner than 1960.) But they failed and there’s still a communist government in Vietnam, with whom the Americans now want to form a military friendship. Remind me again, why were all those Americans and Vietnamese killed and maimed, then?

Mow No Mo’

2006-06-22T22:37:00.000-04:00

When you go for a drive in the country, you are surrounded by all kinds of growing plants. Trees, shrubs, flowers, grass, farm crops, they grow everywhere. When a house or old barn is abandoned, within a few years plants are growing all over them. I have cracks in my driveway’s asphalt that have weeds sprouting out of them. I am told that the Chernobyl reactor site has vegetation growing wild all around it.

If nature can make green stuff grow in such unlikely places, then why do humans have to spend so much time, energy and money to grow green lawns? It makes no sense that we have to work so hard to do something that appears so easy, almost effortless even. The answer, it seems to me, is plainly obvious: Nature hates lawns. Everywhere that humans try to plant grass, nature tries to overrun it with something else. And humans, being stupid and stubborn (a deadly combination) persist. Despite all the accumulating evidence, we think that we can outsmart nature.

A perfect lawn is a fetish. Only a fetish can command and demand such insane slavish devotion. And fetishes are illusions, not real. People spend hours tending to their grass. I have watched them cut it diagonally one way, then the other. Some people cut adjacent sections in different directions so that the differently leaning blades of grass produce different shades of green, like when you brush your fingers against the grain on suede. It takes hours to do this right and is a perfectly insane act. People even fertilize grass. I have owned my own lawns for close to 30 years and mowed my parents’ yards before that and in all that time, the damn grass never stopped growing for minute. Why bother with expensive chemical fertilizer?

You want to know a secret? I have never watered my lawn. Not once. (Well, when I have had to seed torn-up sections of yard after a construction project and it didn’t rain soon after, I may have watered that new bit, but I have never watered my lawn in the usual maintenance sense.) Grass doesn’t care. If there is a dry spell, it becomes dormant and turns yellow. So what. When it rains again, it knows what to do. Why do people fret over it?

Hardly anyone I know walks on their grass, except when mowing it. They’re either at work or inside watching TV with the air conditioning on. So far as I can tell, it’s only squirrels and birds that use our lawns.

And mowing is almost a fetish in itself. I remember one maniac in my old neighbourhood in Toronto. When he was finished cutting the grass, he would get his gasoline-powered leaf blower and blow the grass clippings off the section of sidewalk in front of his house. This is basically the equivalent of vacuuming the outdoors. The crud blows right back while you’re having dinner.

In the past couple of years, I planted clover, as you can see in the accompanying photograph. The seeds cost a little more than grass seed but you end up with a plant that doesn’t grow very tall and so requires far less mowing. It is softer to walk on than grass and because of its flat leaves, clover produces more soil coverage than grass does and so minimizes weed growth. The weed seeds get no sunlight so they die. Grass invites the weeds in to invade. This is a perfect arrangement for the chemical producers, by the way. They convince everyone to plant grass, sell them the unnecessary fertilizer, and then sell them herbicide to kill invading weed species that wouldn’t exist if they hadn’t stubbornly try to plant grass in the first place. Planting clover is the advice of the now-retired guy who was the chief gardener for the National Capital Commission. It’s a terrific idea.

But why do we even care about lawns at all? I have a theory. We all want to be earls or dukes or country squires. Victorian country nobility sat in their large beautiful gardens and drank tea and read genteel poetry to each other. But those lazy twerps had armies of servants to look after those properties, you know. We don’t. But, the image remains. We all want to sit in a beautiful yard and read our genteel poetry while servants bring us tea and sandwiches. But when was the last time you read poetry? We don’t live like that. And we never will.

By the way, I am just guessing about the nobility and their poetry thing as being the catalyst for all this. If you really want to know the history of lawn care, I am prepared to do the research but you will have to send me a cheque first. Research costs money. But I can save you some dollars by telling you that all I was going to do was type, “lawn, grass, history” into a web search engine. You can do that yourself for free. But then, of course, you would have to wade through the thousands of web links to find out about how our fetish with lawn care began. But you’re not going to do that, are you? Do you know why? It’s because you don’t really care about grass. It’s just another pointless consumer marketing trap that we have fallen for.

Secret Meetings

2006-06-13T21:59:00.000-04:00

Last weekend, the Bilderberg Group met at a hotel in Kanata, a west Ottawa suburb. It seems like an odd location for some of the world’s richest and most powerful people to meet. Kanata doesn’t seem exotic enough, somehow. I would have guessed that the Chateau Montebello would be more their style but perhaps they read my earlier blog entry and decided against it. If I were a powerful international multi-millionaire, you can bet that I would not go to a meeting at which I could not get top notch pastry.

It’s a funny thing about their meetings because they are supposed to be quiet and discreet affairs but everyone knows when and where they are held. This year, once again, I did not receive an invitation. This is all the more so galling because they held their conclave no more than 30 minutes from my home. Hell, I would have brought the croissants myself, if they had asked. It’s difficult not to take this snub personally. Next time they call, I am letting the machine answer.

Grooving to the Oldies

2006-06-11T13:53:00.000-04:00

I am one of those people that often misunderstands lyrics of songs. I don’t know if this problem qualifies as one of those learning disabilities like ADD or dyslexia or even if it has a name like MLS for Mangled Lyrics Syndrome. I understand that there are web sites that list common misinterpretations of rock lyrics, but I seem to have the problem with various forms of music, not just rock and roll. Partly as a result of this, and partly because I don’t generally care what rich 20-something year olds have to say about life, I tend to ignore song lyrics. The exception to this has been folk music in which not only are the words better enunciated, in general, but are often the main point.

When programming on CBC Radio One does not interest me, I tend to tune into one of Ottawa’s classic rock stations. This isn’t difficult to do because there does not seem to be any other kind of radio programming these days. What strikes me as odd about the station I usually listen to is that even though they have 30 to 40 years of music to draw from, they seem to operate from a very limited play list. I keep hearing the same tunes. This isn’t only because of Canadian content rules, which explains the repeated playing of Guess Who and Neil Young tunes, but it also holds for US and British rock. Maybe I am cynical but I suspect that what is going on is that the corporations that own the radio stations signed a sweet deal for a small subset of rock and roll songs and that they keep playing that subset to minimize costs. The music, after all, is just filler. The real purpose of commercial radio is to sell cars and refrigerators.

I suspect that there aren’t more than a handful of companies that own all the commercial radio stations. The sound from too many stations in too many cities is simply too similar. It cannot be a coincidence. There is a station here in Ottawa that calls itself Bob, and I think that the main reason for that is so that they can paste the slogan, “Turn your knob to Bob” on the side of city buses. I wonder if there isn’t a Bob affiliate in every city in North America. Or maybe they vary the name and use Rick in some places, leading to the predictable, “Flip your dick to Rick”.

A few weeks ago, I asked my 17-year old nephew if he understood what they were saying in all those hip-hop (or is it called rap?) tunes. He said that he could, mostly, but then admitted that he had to look up some of the lyrics on web sites. But, he said, all they ever sing about is sex, or booty, as it seems to be called these days. Fair enough I suppose, singing about getting laid has been going on for quite a while. Find your old copy of The Band’s Music from Big Pink (a terrific album, by the way) and listen to the cut, Rag Mama Rag. Try to guess what that song is about.

In the car one morning, when I had heard Eric Clapton’s Cocaine one too many times, I played the old Bob Dylan CD, Highway 61 Revisited, on the way to work. I spent a lot of my youth listening to Dylan but have more or less ignored him since the late 70’s. The opening verse of the title cut, sung to very tongue-in-cheek pop-goes-the-weasel music, is irreverent vintage Dylan, his own interpretation of an Old Testament favourite. Listen to this:

God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe says, “Man, you must be putting me on”
God say, “No.”, Abe say “What?”
God say,”You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin’ you better run.”
Well Abe says, “Where you want this killin’ done?”
God says, “Out on Highway 61.”

During a parochial grade-school religious studies class, I distinctly remember that the Abraham infanticide request was presented to us as a blind obedience test. That is, if you really loved the supreme being, you would do anything he(she) asked. Several decades later, this strikes me more akin to cult-indoctrination than anything else. I suppose that in the old days, when tribal and (later) feudal power was assumed to be bestowed upon community leaders by on high, it must have been awfully convenient for the powers-that-were to have access to unquestioned loyalty. They needed a lot of cannon fodder in those days, given the frequency of territorial disputes, and didn’t benefit from modern mass marketing techniques like we have today. It was convenient for people in power that the words in those old texts be obeyed without question and what better way to ensure this than to proclaim them to be the words of the guy upstairs. And since the local princes, earls and lords represented the big guy here on earth, well, folks had to obey them too. The literal interpretation of holy texts has always been selective, however. Fundamentalist evangelical preachers have no problem selling prayer cloths during their sermons even though Jesus tossed money-grubbers out of the temple. Having a voice in the sky tell you to kill your son for an essentially arbitrary reason seems like a steep price to pay to live in Eden. “Get me out of this garden!”, would be most people’s reaction. Dylan says all that and more in an eight-line verse. I am jealous.

The last verse of Highway 61 Revisited could be the inspiration for the 1997 post Desert Storm movie, Wag the Dog,

Now the rovin' gambler he was very bored
He was tryin' to create a next world war
He found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor
He said I never engaged in this kind of thing before
But yes I think it can be very easily done
We'll just put some bleachers out in the sun
And have it on Highway 61.

DWC Movies

2006-05-25T22:48:00.000-04:00

They don’t make DWC movies like they used to. (DWC stands for Decline of Western Civilization, by the way.) I am sure that most of you know what I am talking about. The genre usually depicts a post-apocalyptic world devastated by an all out nuclear or biological war, where safe havens are few and jungle law is the rule.

One of the first that I saw was The Omega Man, with that old gun nut, Charlton Heston. (What kind of a made-up name is Charlton, anyway?) I saw it on television, which is just as well because I’d hate to have spent hard-earned cash to see it in a theatre. In the film, Hess is barricaded in his high-rise apartment all night long, with a rifle or two, while mutants roam the city streets in search of innocent victims. (It seems to be a given in these movies that mutants always try to kill nonmutants, the prettier the better.) The Omega Man’s mutants cannot tolerate the sunlight so that during daylight hours Charlton can run around the deserted city looking for scraps of food in abandoned homes and grocery stores. Must be risky on dark rainy days; thank goodness for the right to bear arms. In the end, he finds other nonmutants to move in with. DWC movies often have hopeful if not entirely happy endings.

Charlton had a big part in another DWC series that started with the Planet of the Apes. In that series, humans regressed while chipanzee-like primates supplanted them on the evolutionary hierarchy. I only saw the first movie in the series as I found the plot much too believable.

One the most famous DWC films, and one that I actually own a VHS copy of, is The Road Warrior. It’s the middle entry of a trilogy that started with the low budget Mad Max and an over-the-top sequel that was so forgettable that I can’t remember its title. Road Warrior nearly has it all: fear of the loss of oil, good looking blondes that get killed by human predators, weird mechanical contraptions, a desolate countryside laid waste by, what else, nuclear war, and lots and lots of gratuitous violence to demonstrate how little value life retains after Armageddon. And best of all, no dumb computer generated graphics (of course, maybe there were some and I couldn’t tell). But Road Warrior had no mutants. It had lots of extremely weird characters, but no human mutants. It’s a terrible omission.

A serious entry in this genre was Fahrenheit 451. In it, freedom-hating futuristic firefighters set fire to books to prevent citizens from reading too much. In the fictional future, keeping ordinary people ignorant is a frequent theme. That future may already be here, I sometimes fear. I mean, no video rental store carries Fahrenheit 451 anymore but I can find Porky’s anywhere. Soon, Porky’s will be in the classics section.

My favourite scene in a DWC movie was in Escape from New York. In this film, a post-nuclear (again) Manhattan Island is a vast prison, guarded only around its perimeter. Inside, the prisoners run the place. (This is not necessarily a stretch for some parts of that city, or many others for that matter.) The President’s plane crashes inside Manhattan and the prisoners take the Command in Chief hostage. The authorities send in Kurt Russell (miscast, I thought) to rescue the Pres. One of the things he’s warned about before going in are the mutants living in the sewers. Sewer-dwelling mutants are my favourite. Shortly after entering the prison, Kurt is walking along with a woman he met, who is acting as his guide. Abruptly, a mutant emerges from the depths of somewhere, grabs her and drags her down into the sewer. We never see her again and the movie continues on, not skipping a beat. The scene speaks volumes without saying a thing.

They don’t shoot scenes like that anymore. Imagined fears don’t cut the mustard these days. Imagination requires effort. It requires life experience and that’s in short supply. People have television and videogame experience now, not life experience, and in television-land and videogame-land, you have to spoon-feed people because they have forgotten how to use utensils.

Cruz’ing around Mother Russia

2006-05-24T22:20:00.000-04:00

If you are an occasional reader of these pages, you will know that I am a fan of well written, intelligent, crime and police-procedural novels. I like hard-boiled, I like character studies and I like atmosphere. I don’t like cute locked-room mysteries or prissy little detectives with mustaches. A fantasy of mine is for some hoodlum to kill off that Poirot idiot just to shut him up.

With his novels about the Russian detective, Arkady Renko, the American author Martin Cruz Smith gives atmosphere, plot and character in spades. The first novel in the series, Gorky Park, is probably his most widely recognized work, if only because of the catchy title and Hollywood movie of the same name that was based on the novel. The five books in the Renko series follow the detective’s career starting from the Soviet era, through glasnost and perestroika, up to the present day where new Russian millionaires seem to mysteriously emerge from between parked cars on a daily basis. As in real life, no one knows where they come from.

When I think of Russia and Russian literature (though I must add that I have read very few Russian classics) I think bleak. Dreary and depressing stories of miserable lives are what come to mind. I know that this is probably nothing more than a popular cultural stereotype and not at all fair but I can’t help myself. But bleak can be a good atmosphere to create in matters criminal. If you like bleak, then the Renko series is for you. The plots are convoluted, the layers are thick and the bad guys are very bad. The good guys aren’t that good either and Renko is not liked by any of them, good or bad. Smith paints a picture of a society in which it is best not to ask questions but Renko keeps asking them, sometimes despite his better judgment.

Smith is a master of place. The various novels are set in Moscow, Havana, aboard a ship, and even in New York for a bit. His reviewers (real reviewers, not me) speak of Smith’s meticulous research and I can believe it. When Renko goes somewhere, by the end of the novel I feel like I went there with him. That’s not an easy thing for an author to do.

In the last Renko novel, Wolves Eat Dogs (2004), much of the novel’s action takes place in and around Chernobyl. Several months after reading the book, I can now only vaguely remember parts of its criminal plot but the descriptions of the areas around the burnt out reactor and of the people who live near or within the no-go zone are chilling. Renko’s trip to Chernobyl gave me the creeps. I had seen the documentaries and read the magazine articles but what happened there did not sink in until I read this book.

The detailed research can also be found in his non-Renko novels. I really enjoyed two in particular, Stallion Gate and December 6. Stallion Gate is a telling of the Manhattan project, the building of the first atom bomb by the U.S., through the eyes of an Indian in the military who is assigned to work at the New Mexico research site. I have read quite a bit about that project over the years and this fictional point of view was a treat. December 6 tells the story of an American living in Tokyo in the months leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, a subject I knew almost nothing about. I don’t think these two books can be categorized as historical novels but you do learn some history while enjoying very good reads.

I want to add that if you decide to read the Renko series, I think that it’s a good idea to read the books in chronological order. This does not always matter so much with other character-based series but Renko’s development depends on the historical context. Smith cannot avoid the politics but it is presented in a very personal way. There is no preaching here, just good stories.

No Croissant at the Inn

2006-05-23T21:19:00.000-04:00

Following up on our previous research, we stopped at the Chateau Montebello on the way to Mont Tremblant last weekend. It was late morning and we were looking for a quick croissant and coffee although we could probably have been coaxed into eating an early lunch. Although we’ve live in the Ottawa area for nearly 4 years now, we had never taken the time to go see the Montebello. Visiting other old railroad chateaux and having afternoon tea or a morning coffee in them has been an on-going little project of ours. And sampling their croissants is a harmless little fetish of mine. (I am embarrassed to say that we have not been to the Chateau Laurier yet, either.)

The trip was a waste of time. We arrived there at 11:00 and the dining room was not open for lunch till 11:30 a.m. There was no other coffee shop or small diner in the place and so we left. I cannot tell you how disappointed we were, especially since the anticipation had made me hungry. And I can be ugly when I am hungry. What is the world coming to when you cannot stop in at a four-star resort and get some pastry and coffee?

Doing Mountain Time

2006-05-05T19:02:00.000-04:00

I heard a radio report yesterday about the sentencing of the 9/11 conspirator, Zacarias Moussaoui, to life imprisonment without parole. The news item concerned itself mainly with the courtroom drama during the sentencing. As reported, the judge made some colourful remarks, as did the convicted would-be terrorist. Near the end of the item, the announcer stated that Moussaoui was going to be sent to a very high security federal prison in the Colorado Rockies. This really annoyed me.

I sincerely hope that the fact checkers behind the report made a mistake. I hope that the announcer used the term "Rockies" erroneously and that the prison is really somewhere in the eastern part of the state, just off an interstate, near a strip mall, or maybe close to a row of gasoline stations and greasy fast food joints. If the prison really is in the mountains, or even just in the foothills, somebody's head should roll.

There must be hundreds of thousands of acres of dry, ugly, useless land in Texas where they could have built a suitable prison. Surely, they could have found an old warehouse in the meatpacking district of New York City that they could have turned into a space for housing this lowly bunch. There will soon be dozens of abandoned General Motors factories screaming for new tenants with plenty of nearby laid-off welders who would only be too happy for the work of sealing up the windows and doors of the places in preparation for storing murderers, rapists and terrorists. What about New Jersey? But somehow, somewhere, a U.S. federal government bureaucrat made the decision to build a prison in the middle of some of the most beautiful real estate on earth. It should be illegal to be that stupid.

Beaver vs. Man

2006-04-30T15:17:00.000-04:00

I revisited the site of the hyperactive Petrie Island beavers a couple of weeks ago and shot the accompanying picture. It appears as though Ottawa parks maintenance people have finished what the beavers started. The felled tree trunks were nowhere to be seen, however, since human tree choppers take the fallen logs away with them. This must have annoyed the beavers to distraction, since I am sure they were hoping to get their paws on those trunks. Damming the Ottawa river will have to wait for another day. I am not so sure that this is good management practice on the part of the maintenance staff. It may not be a good idea to annoy these beavers.

For the (older) Guy Who Has Everything

2006-04-30T14:07:00.000-04:00

With father’s day coming soon and because of the fact that a lot of my friends are on the down slope side of 40, I remembered back to my 40th birthday and the present I received from my mother that year. Buying presents for men can be difficult, all the more so for people like me who see no point in keeping useless trinkets around the house. I have owned some of these during my life and resent having to resist the impulse to throw the stuff into the recycling bin just in case the person who gave it to me notices. So they sit there, collect dust and I feel guilty.

My mother is a practical person, however, so when I suggested that she get me one of those contraptions that my father had, she didn’t bat an eye and bought me one. I am referring to an ear and nose hair trimmer. This device is something that non-hirsute females may simply never think of. But guys everywhere who read this will know what I am talking about. I cannot describe the relief I feel after a trimming. Hair growth in those areas is an insidious thing because it progresses slowly and you don’t normally pay any attention to it until you realize that something has been irritating you for a couple of weeks but you weren’t quite sure what. It’s not something that is immediately obvious when looking in a mirror, a fact not aided by age-related deterioration of eyesight, which is a parallel and contributing irritant.

Ladies, if the man in your life is advancing in age, doesn’t wear earrings, has all the CD/DVD/MP3 players that he will ever need until the next time they change the technology, and you have run out of ideas for presents for his birthday or father’s day, get him one of these. They don’t cost much and give back so much for such little outlay. There is a bonus to receiving one and that is the laughs he’ll get at work when he tells people about his present. The bottom line is that he will sleep better without that vague funny feeling in his ears and he might stop rubbing his itching nose in public.

I am just trying to help.

No Bull

2006-04-18T21:57:00.000-04:00

A couple of months ago I received a batch of photos attached to an email, the way we probably all do from time to time. The photos were of various bizarre things around the world. One of them was of a matador being gored by a bull during a bullfight. He was being gored in an especially sensitive area of his body, and it was the kind of image that makes you wince. I suspect that a lot of you have seen this particular image. The bull had stuck the guy up his backside and seemed to be in the middle of doing a head toss that might send the poor sap into the cheap seats. I still squirm thinking about it.

My first thought was that I wished I had been the photographer that took the picture. It’s a once in a lifetime shot. You have to be in the right spot, at the correct angle, at the right time and be at the ready to catch something that almost never happens. Sports and editorial photographers live for those moments. It’s a shame that the shooter never gets any royalties from the forwarded emails.

My second thought was to cheer. A childhood friend of mine, who died of cancer several years ago, and I had a running joke throughout our lives. Whenever we’d hear about a matador being maimed or killed, or whenever we’d hear about some idiot in Pamplona who managed to get caught in a bull stampede, we’d phone or email each other to say “Yessss” or do a cyber high-five. To us, it was a bit like sticking up for the underdog bull, so to speak.

I do not really know much about bullfighting, nor am I a bleeding heart about most things. But bullfighting has always seemed to be particularly unfair to me. Basically, a bunch of guys torture a bull in public and then kill it while people cheer. Before the matador goes down to field level, a bunch of other guys on horseback exhaust and disorient the bull for a while, stick spears into it, and generally run it into the ground. By the time the greasy haired guy in the shiny suit does his cape dance, the poor animal is bleeding from multiple wounds and is exhausted. I have no doubt that it’s still angry too, and there’s no way you’d catch me down in the dirt with the beast, but it always seemed to me that they should be throwing the flowers at the horses the guys were riding while running down and spearing the bull. The bull was still healthy and spirited while those poor horses were doing their job. I bet if a horse gets gored they just shoot it to put it out of its misery. Some thanks. After all that, it’s the matador who gets the money and the groupies. It doesn’t seem right.

There’s a more pragmatic reason why a matador should get stuck with a horn now and then, other than my desire for a fair fight. Bullfighting is supposed to be a macho sport. How macho would it be if no matadors ever got hurt? After a few years of injury-free bull torture, the entire show wouldn’t be too different than going to an amusement park. It would be like pro-wrestling. It would be like lining up a few head of steer and shooting them down with machine guns. It would be macho-illusion, not the real thing. It’s good for business for a bull to spike a guy every once in a while and I am sure the promoters depend on it. And it gives me the illusion, for a few minutes at least, that the bull has a fighting chance. It might even give the bull the same illusion. As the bull in the picture was sinking his sharp white horn into the human idiot with the cape, I wonder if he was thinking, “I might be going down, but I am taking you with me.” But it’s only a temporary illusion. No bulls get out alive.

Don’t Shoot All the Lawyers

2006-03-29T21:04:00.000-05:00

I recently re-read the novel, Reversible Errors, by Scott Turow. I first read it in 2002, when it was first published, and picked it up at a 2nd hand book store about a month ago. I had forgotten what a good writer he is.

There are a number of popular current novelists, whose plots are centered on the legal system and courtroom drama, but their books tend to be light and formulaic. The lawyers are too heroic, or too crooked, or too good-looking, or too idealistic to believe. Why, in almost every one of John Grisham’s novels, is there always a young, tall, buxom, gorgeous, blond legal genius with great legs? How can that be?

The setting of most legal thrillers that I have read has been in the U.S. and, all too often, American writers feel the need to put guns in the hands of their lawyers to have them solve crimes, or sue evil corporations for billions of dollars or rid the city of corrupt politicians forever. Maybe I expect too much, they are supposed to be dramatic thrillers after all, but the stories are a little too big, too important, and the resolutions often just too pat. There can’t be that many lawyers that save the world, nail the babe, get rich and still find time to cook and pet the dog. Don’t misunderstand me, there is a place for them when you don’t want to read something too complex, or need an audio book to listen to during a long drive down a boring highway. But by and large, they are digested easily and quickly forgotten.

Turow’s plots are layered and complicated and his characters are lovingly and slowly revealed through subtle, careful narrative. You never quite know what’s going to happen next, so he fulfills the first criteria of a thriller, but at the same time the reader discovers subtle nuances of behaviour and motivation in the novels’ characters. They do things that surprise you; they do things that annoy you. (Maybe it’s just my own peculiar criteria, but when I am reading a book and get angry at something a fictional character is up to, I know the author is doing really good work.) The characters want to be important and even noble, but they aren’t always so, but every action is believable. Turow has obviously carefully thought out why people do what they do, what their allegiances are, what is important to them and how much of their souls are for sale. It’s mature and intelligent writing. Treat yourself.

Chewing Wood

2006-03-26T22:26:00.000-05:00

I live not far from Petrie Island, at the east end of Ottawa. The island is in the Ottawa River. It is a marshy park area, full of inlets and streams with a maintained beach, some recreational facilities and a wooded area. It is a bit of a wildlife refuge with turtles, muskrats, migrating wetland birds and some of the most ambitious beavers I have ever come across. Take a look at the accompanying photograph of beaver industry. Those chewed-up trees you see are two and three feet in diameter.

I think Petrie Island must be where A-type personality beavers are banished to when their former pond mates can’t stand them anymore. Beavers are of course, busy, hence the cliché, but the ones roaming around this marsh must be the equivalent of those workaholic crazies that most of us have known, who are at their desk by 7:00 a.m., never leave before 8:00 p.m., are usually at work on weekends and have not taken a vacation in 10 years because there is so much to do. (There is always work to do, you numbskulls.)

In human society such future burnouts are left alone, by and large. Their saner colleagues don‘t want to stand too near in case it’s catching and their employers know enough not to look a gift horse in the mouth. If someone is willing to work a double shift and be only paid for one, why argue?

We can only imagine what is going through an A-type beaver’s mind: “Oh, a 400 foot tall, 3-foot diameter tree. Gotta take ‘er down, nyuck, nyuck.”

Beavers are probably less civilized than humans. If the beaver in the next dam is so nuts that they gnaw on 3-foot diameter trees for fun, all the other beavers in the pond neighbourhood probably form a vigilante committee to try and get rid of the overachiever. It must be galling to have the beaver next door chewing all night long when you’re trying to get some sleep but it must be that much worse when you realize that the nutcase is about to destroy the entire surrounding forest. Perhaps they just reach a point where enough is enough and they chase the offender away.

I think those offenders end up at this nearby island. They must take one look at the Ottawa River and lose control of their senses. The possibility of damming something that wide must be like a drug to self-actualized Maslowvian beavers like these. Humans might take a lesson from beavers. There is nothing wrong with working hard, but if the twerp at the next desk never goes home and brags about all the work that he still has to do, you’d be doing everyone a favour if you took him to Petrie Island and chained him to a tree.

Orbiting Garbage

2006-03-02T22:34:00.000-05:00

Humans are slobs. Not all of us, of course, but enough are. If you don’t believe me, drive the 401 highway from Montreal to Toronto (or vice-versa) on a long weekend, at Thanksgiving say, and try to use the toilets at the roadside service centers. If you can stomach being in there, you’re tougher than I am.

Do you want to test your innate optimism about human kind? Get a job as a flunky at a restaurant for a week, or any other food service establishment, and watch what people will do when they know that they won’t have to pick up after themselves.

I don’t believe that this is due to the collapse of modern society or anything so dramatic as that. Being slobs comes naturally. Go to a zoo and watch the apes. Were it not for public embarrassment or our mothers screaming at us to pick up after ourselves, we would probably all end up living like the apes in those cages, with bits of food in our fur, flinging our dung around and picking our noses. We come by the behaviour naturally. It’s in our genetic make-up. In the wild, wolf packs don’t clean up after themselves, they just eat those bloody filthy carcasses somewhere other than at home so that the mess ends up in some other animal’s back yard. But, nature looks after itself by having scavengers eat the carcass remains and by having the rest rot. Unfortunately, we humans have invented stuff that doesn’t rot.

When mining companies are finished extracting what they want from open pits in the ground, they put a padlock on the fence gate and walk away. There’s no reason for them to act otherwise, since restoring the planet to the same state that they found it would cost them plenty and their objective is to make money. Since no one forces them to clean up after themselves, they don’t. They don’t have mommies nagging after them. If corporations leave behind messes they are just acting normally, like us, and it is the fault of the rest of us, society, that we care so little about our surroundings that we allow this to happen. A simple change in the rules would force enterprises to plan for and execute closure plans that didn’t leave behind toxins in the dirt that will maim your children. That exit clean up would simply be another cost of doing business, yet we can’t even be bothered to do that.

I have known people in the IT industry who felt good about the work that they were doing because they believed that computer technology was a clean industry, unlike say, evil automobile companies or oil refineries. It might be interesting to get the opinion of people six generations from now scratching their heads wondering what to do with all those mountains of dead PC’s in landfills.

Civilization is a thin veneer. Our homes, most of them, are clean, we wash our cars regularly, companies hire people to vacuum our offices. But all those toilet flushes, all those garbage bins full of crap that we throw away, our scrapped cars, soiled diapers, all that we leave behind ends up somewhere. We can hide the mess for a while, but it’s really still there.

There are, after all, only three places where all the garbage can go: in the water, in the air or in the ground. Those are the only options, or so I used to think. But it turns out I was wrong. Now we put it into orbit too.

A few weeks ago, I watched an excellent science television program called Découverte on the French CBC network that ran a segment on garbage in space. At the moment, there are about 100,000 pieces of junk in space between 1 and 10 cm in size. There are another 10,000 pieces of junk greater than 10 cm in size. They estimate that last number will grow to 50,000 in the next few decades. That’s just the stuff orbiting earth.

The program went on to describe the various shields that were placed on the space station to protect itself from the smallest of the particles. If a big one hits, well, there’s no protection from that. They showed pictures of impact damage on some tiles from the Space Shuttle. When the shuttle last docked with the space station it had to make an evasive maneuver to avoid behind hit by something. Several years ago an astronaut lost his grip on a video camera and it’s still out there. They have lost hammers, pliers, and other objects. The program even mentioned one enterprising outfit in the U.S. that will put your ashes in orbit after cremation. The urn is metallic, about the size of a large tin of tomatoes. They have a bunch of them in inventory and are waiting for a commercial carrier to take them into orbit and then, well, leave them there.

NASA has full-time staff whose job it is to track all of these objects. Think about that. They have to hire and pay a group of people who sit at desks and computers all day in order to observe and track the orbits of the garbage that we’ve left in space.

In order to be in orbit, those objects must be traveling at about 25,000 miles per hour. When a ¼ inch titanium bolt sails through an astronaut’s skull at 25,000 miles per hour someday, there will be a huge outcry about what we’re doing to clean up space.

Motivation Posters

2006-02-21T21:51:00.000-05:00

I have never understood the point of motivational posters. I think that most people have seen these either at their own place of employment or in their dentist’s waiting room or some place like that. They typically depict a bucolic nature scene photographed at a spectacularly beautiful spot on the planet like the Rockies or Antarctica or the Serengeti. They then destroy the effect by including an asinine quote like “Achievement is its Own Reward” or “The Path to Commitment Leads Back to You” or some other nonsensical phrase too stupid to believe.

Since employers pay money for these things I can only assume that their objective is to not-so-subliminally convince people to work harder for less money. I cannot believe that it works. I know when I look at posters of breath-taking mountain peaks or whales splashing down into the water, all I can think about for a few minutes is when I can take another hiking vacation to the Rockies or to Newfoundland and can I afford a 2-3 month leave of absence to do so. Hunkering back down to my desk to put in some extra effort is pretty much the last thing on my mind. If the photograph is striking enough I can stare it for a long time and enjoy it for its own sake; I’ve paid good money to visit art galleries that didn’t deliver half as much. I don’t think that’s what the boss had in mind.

The only good thing about the posters that I can see is that the companies who print and sell them had to buy the images from photographers. It’s reassuring to know that someone benefited. It’s not easy trying to make a living by selling pictures.

I have seen spoofs of motivational posters that are quite funny, e.g., a scene of sprinters crossing a finish line that features the poor guy who came in second to last with a cute quote underneath, “Sometimes, even when you give 110%, you still lose.” I am not sure anyone ever buys those.

If you ever get the chance to see an exhibit by the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, don’t miss it. His photographs of what man has created or is in the middle of destroying can take your breath away. He did a series on the ship wrecking yards in Bangladesh depicting the astonishingly difficult job that the men there do dismantling ocean going vessels largely by hand. I think that a picture like one of those, showing a group of dirt poor guys in ragged clothing, in bare feet or sandals, with no gloves or head protection, framed to show some missing toes and fingers, carrying inches thick sheets of steel in the syrupy humid tropical heat with a caption underneath that reads, “This could be you so stop whining about your job” could motivate the hell out of someone.

Razor’s Edge

2006-02-20T19:09:00.000-05:00

This is a follow up on a topic that I wrote about last year. See here and here for the previous entries.

A reader has kindly informed me that he saw an advertisement for a new razor that uses 5 blades. I have been negligent in my research and I only recently found out that there already was a 4-bladed shaver on the market. Progress is moving along faster that I thought. In my earlier piece I had predicted a 7-blade razor by the year 2012. That may turn out to be pessimistic.

I finally saw a television advertisement for the 5-bladed shaving razor this past weekend. Not only are there 5 cutting blades, but there is a 6th one on the back for trimming sideburns so I am surprised that they didn’t call it a 6-bladed razor. There is even a battery-powered version that pulsates; it has a microchip to warn you when the batteries are low. Why didn’t they embed an MP3 player while they were at it, the lazy buggers?

A couple of months ago, Macleans ran a story about drugs that can prevent female menstrual cycles. They quoted some researchers who put forth the idea that menstruation was somehow a bad thing that we should try to alter, millions of years of adaptation notwithstanding. With all the advances in hormones and genetics I am surprised that there is not already a pill that prevents beard growth in men. I wonder if there is some kind of primeval aversion to that. Studies have proved that beard growth increases in sailors in the few days before reaching port. It turns out that the anticipation of possible sexual activity increases hormonal production whose side effect is more rapid beard growth. My guess is that the average guy wouldn’t want to send out the wrong signals by artificially keeping his face too smooth.

Intelligent (?) Design

2006-01-24T10:38:00.000-05:00

There used to be a cartoon in the Globe and Mail newspaper called Porterfield. Porterfield was a ho-hum middle manager, a brow beaten corporation man. In one frame that I remember well, he and a colleague are looking into a large roomful of empty desks because no one in the department was at work. The caption read, “Either they’re not here or they’re hiding. Either way, it’s a bad sign.”

The 43rd President of the United States is on record as stating that he believes the jury is still out on the Theory of Evolution. This was a remarkable statement. He may really have meant what he said or it just may have been a cynical political pronouncement meant to appeal to a constituency whose favour he was courting at the time. Either way, it’s bad sign.

It’s worrisome to me that the leader of a modern civilized nation should have such little understanding of basic science. One could argue that scientific progress is the single most important achievement of our species. It affects our lives every day in hundreds of different ways. We should all have some basic scientific understanding in order to function properly as citizens. It’s not a good thing to be ignorant.

The people who care about these things have re-packaged and re-spun Creationism and changed its name to Intelligent Design. Battle lines are being drawn in various U.S. school districts and the American media are doing the usual sound bite news coverage about it, complete with interviews with boring researchers who can’t figure out what all the fuss is about, all the while wondering how the exposure will affect their grants. They will often interview a religious person who insists that he will not let the government ram the evolution doctrine down his kids’ throats. It is all so predictable.

There’s a sweet allegory that is often used in these discussions about a hiker in the woods who finds a pocket watch on the trail. Having found such a device is it reasonable that the hiker would assume that the watch had a creator or would he instead conclude that the watch randomly came into being by complex forces of nature. It’s a cute little tale but it’s bullshit. The first thing that anyone in their right mind would do after finding such a watch is to login onto eBay to see what the thing is worth.

One wonders about creationist logic. I guess that in their view, when the supreme being rested with his/her feet up on the seventh day, that first Saturday (or was it Sunday?), satan must have been scurrying around the planet putting all those phony fossils in the rocks just to confuse godless scientists. Sneaky devil.

The entire debate seems so beside the point to me that I marvel that it still goes on. If a supreme being set evolution into motion, that would be no less a wonder than the 7-day creation myth. I mean, whichever way it happened, I’m impressed. I don’t believe that evolutionary theory makes any assumptions or predictions about the supreme being whatsoever, so why get upset about it? We will find out who was right when we die. Or maybe we won’t.

My main problem with Intelligent Design is the Intelligent part. Take a look around. Do you see much evidence of intelligence? Maybe I missed it. Every year, people crash their cars during the first snowfall of the season. People still fall for transparently obvious on-line scams. They shoot each other in arguments over parking spots. We don’t think about the environment until the stuff in the water produces babies with 3 eyeballs. Intelligent? Not likely. My cat has more sense than half the humans I have met.

Doctrinaire fundamentalism often seems to give rise to egomaniacal charismatic leaders. You would think that we would have learned to avoid them like the plague by now. Why aren’t we more suspicious when someone comes along and tells us that they know the one true way? Remember Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pat Robertson and my personal favourites, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker? Tammy and Jim built a multi-thousand dollar air-conditioned doghouse for their pooch using their followers’ hard-earned cash. Then, on the day the dog died, they brought the lifeless body onto the set of their religious television program and asked their viewers to join them in a live TV prayer in order to convince the supreme being to bring the mutt back to life. It just lied there, dead as can be, of course. Considering all the good that they could have done in the world with their millions it can make one ill to think of that spectacle. But I cannot help thinking that if the supreme being was paying attention to the broadcast that night, he/she might have cramped up from laughing so hard because aside from everything else, the scene was hilarious. Do you really think Intelligent Design was at work there?

Middle Ages Redux

2006-01-18T13:36:00.000-05:00

Last autumn I spotted a job ad in the classifieds of a local newspaper. I cannot remember whether it was in one of Ottawa’s main dailies or in one of those free weeklies that get dropped off at my door. The ad was for a contract part-time position doing bulk deliveries of that same newspaper to drop-off points east of the city, as far as Hawkesbury, which is about an hour east of Ottawa. The requirements for the job were to be available from 4:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. 6 days per week, be bilingual and to own a reliable car. The published pay rate, and the job did not include a mileage allowance, was around $12 per hour. I estimated that the round trip would cost from $15-$20 in gasoline every day which would bring the income down to around minimum wage. To that, one must also factor in increased maintenance costs on the vehicle.

It is difficult to imagine anyone taking this job. The net income from the work would not be enough to save up for a replacement vehicle so the job is basically un-sustainable. In the medium to long run, it would cost one more to go to work than to stay home. By implication, the employers are assuming that the employee will subsidize them. I could make the argument that one would be better off selling the car and living off the proceeds, while continuing to look for other work, rather than take this position. The only way I can see it paying off is if the person in the job used it as a legal cover for illegal drug deliveries. Now that would make sense.

We used to call this serfdom, but they probably do not teach history in schools anymore so the number of people left who know the term is diminishing daily.

U.S. robber baron coal mining companies used to charge rent to their employees for the shacks they lived in and also held monopolies on the retail and bar trade near those mining communities. In the long run, by amazing coincidence, it used to cost those workers more money to go to work than to not go to work, all of it paid back to the companies that employed them. It’s interesting to note the historical role that ignorance plays. The less history we know and the less educated the general population is, the easier it becomes to pull this con off.

In the southeastern U.S. coal mining towns of the last century old-time religion played an important role is keeping people stupid. They promised eternal happiness in the afterlife if you towed the line in this one. (Actually that’s pretty much what they preach now.) That such fundamentalists frowned on non-approved reading and learning benefited someone, notably not the miners. The continued ignorance of the members of fundamentalist religions and social movements is paramount. The Catholic Church still maintains (I believe) an Index of forbidden books. They actually try to tell people what not to read! Evangelical and fundamentalist Islamic movements do much the same thing.

In the Middle Ages, maintaining a general low level of knowledge among serfs was relatively easy. There weren’t many books and the sharecropping life was a daily struggle that didn’t allow much time for reading, even if one knew how to read. It sometimes appears to me that modern society is trying to replicate that state of affairs. Religion may not always be an easy sell these days, but professional sports and inane television offer equivalent altars for the masses. There are plenty of diversions from reality, large home plasma screens, babes on TV, etc, and they all cost money.

The other feature of medieval times was the noble class. The criterion for entry back then was genetically based which did a good job of denying access to power to the unwashed for a long time. For centuries no one even questioned it, an amazing feat of spin doctoring. I believe that today’s power elite is nostalgic for that convenient state of affairs and want to bring it back. They like having serfs around and who can blame them. Popular reports tell that Louis XIV had servants who did his wiping up after bowel movements. Imagine being at the meeting of the household staff when they asked for volunteers for that job! It’s really convenient to pay nannies less than minimum wage so that we can go off to work all day and buy SUV’s, gourmet restaurant meals and large plasma screen televisions.

Ridiculously pathetic and stupid public leaders are something else that we have in common with the Middle Ages, it seems to me. Over the last decade or more, corporate bigwigs have paid themselves scandalously high salaries and bonuses for oftentimes just showing up. The people in charge of the HP-Compaq merger a few years ago got millions in performance bonuses for having merely executed the joining of the two firms. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to wait a few years and pay them according to how successful the merger turned out to be? They basically rewarded themselves for being in the right seat at the right time. The self-congratulatory tendencies of present-day political classes are spectacular to behold and their resemblance to medieval nobility is note-worthy. Our neighbours to the south seem to only want Presidents who are related to previous Presidents. The Florida Bush brother, Jeb, is high on the list of possible future Commanders-in-Chief. Power all over the world is handed down to wives, sons, daughters, and I never hear a word of ridicule or protest about the practice.

Another feature of the Middle Ages was bad hygiene and the occasional plague. That doesn’t bear thinking about.

Mortgage Fraud

2006-01-14T14:53:00.000-05:00

There was an article about mortgage fraud in a recent edition of Macleans magazine. The crime probably takes various forms but my understanding is that what basically happens is that a criminal steals a homeowner’s identity and takes out a new mortgage in the homeowner’s name. The crook then gets a cheque from the bank and disappears with the cash. A month later the bank phones the actual homeowner and says, “You’re late with the $1200 payment. When can we expect it?”

The homeowner, who was probably watching television or surfing the net answers, “I think you’ve got the wrong number. Is this some kind of telemarketing scam?” And thus begins a nightmare. It will likely cost the homeowner thousands in legal fees to get out of the mess, because the banks and financial institutions, who stupidly handed out the mortgage money to the wrong person, want to recoup their losses so they sue everyone in sight, including the innocent homeowner.

It seems to me that the least a bank should do, as part of their due diligence when handing out what is essentially someone else’s money, is to make certain that the person they give it to is actually who they say they are. A quick phone call to the actual homeowner, before handing over the money, might be a good idea.

Now, I know that modern financial institutions have downsized in recent years to cut costs. Their staff are probably off attending so many seminars on time-management techniques that they don’t have time to do the basics of their jobs, but come on now, is suing innocent homeowners to cover your own incompetent butts really the best tactic in this situation? It’s not as if we need more reasons to hate banks.

(Pssst, listen Mr. Banker, if you started verifying the identity of the people you give cheques to, the way you should have been doing all along, you could start charging service fees for it, thus turning your bumbling into a profit center.)

No Fly Lists

2006-01-14T14:46:00.000-05:00

I know that the folks who are in charge of airline security did not intend to become laughing stocks. “The world has changed,” we keep being told, and since they are in charge of looking after us in the sky, maybe we owe them some respect. Trouble is, some eternal truths do not change and one of them is that respect must be earned.

The recent news has been full of tales of innocent people being refused entry onto U.S. airliners because their names are on something called a No Fly list. They are not on the list themselves, but rather some other person with the same name is, and that seems to be good enough to keep one off an airplane nowadays. One specific story was about a 12 year old girl who was not allowed on a flight to go visit her granny over the Christmas holidays. It is not clear from the media stories I have read how one gets onto the list but it is becoming apparent that it is difficult to get off of it. If they ever list someone called “John Smith,” that may be the end of the commercial airline industry.

(I can’t help cynically wondering if there isn’t some rule about not being obliged to refund a traveler if refused entry because of being on the No Fly list. If so, that might be a boon to the airline industry. The possibility of tossing some people off airplanes and then re-selling their empty seats to others has got to be an irresistible temptation to some ticket agents. “Hey, let’s put this low discount fare guy on the list and sell a full-fare flight to that expense account guy over there.”)

It’s all a puzzle to me. Since they’re checking everyone for weapons and explosives anyway, and since they are supposed to lock up the doors to the pilot’s cabin these days, then what does it matter who is on the flight. Osama himself could be on board, for all I care. Other than shouting boring political slogans, what harm could he do that would be any worse than enduring an arrogant drunken air rage lout making a fool of himself because he grew up in a culture that does not encourage people to behave like adults.

The kind of ridiculous mistakes that I have been hearing and reading about have an air of hasty incompetence about them. As if the government contract for building the No Fly list was awarded in too big a hurry to some U.S. Senator’s brother-in-law or cousin. A news story surfaced a couple of months ago about the millions in U.S. taxpayer dollars that were wasted as part of various U.S. Homeland Security boondoggles. For example, an agency used their grant to install air condition in garbage trucks. Building a useless list is child’s play in comparison. But I may be missing the real point. The government sub-contractor can now apply for a new grant to eliminate duplication and improve the No Fly list. It’s an opportunity after all, not a problem!

On one news report yesterday I heard the comment that officials now fear that news stories about mistaken identities might undermine serious security considerations and that the public might lose faith in their ability to keep air travel safe. Too late, guys, the barn door is wide open. Stand-up comedians are already writing jokes for their nightclub acts.

McService

2006-01-11T20:18:00.000-05:00

During lunch with a friend several months ago the topic of retail service came up. He travels to Europe on business a fair bit. He said that some Europeans he meets are quite mystified why we North Americans seem to have made the apparent trade-off of foregoing quality service in favour of getting the lowest possible sticker price. We are willing to waste our valuable time listening to music on the telephone while waiting to talk to a customer service representative. We seem to be willing to spend hours of our weekends stuck at interminable red lights waiting to turn into the too-large parking lot of a big box store where we have to fight crowds, serve ourselves in crowded aisles, and walk for miles just to save a few dollars on the purchase price of the latest piece of junk that will clutter up our lives. The folks he spoke with did not understand why we put up with the poor level of service that we have grown accustomed to.

By coincidence, a few days after that I heard a panel discussion on CBC Radio One about the same topic. The panel’s opinions were split. Some were appalled at the generally poor product knowledge and low level of professionalism of sales associates at the stores where they shopped. The rest of the panel was of the opinion that given that the retail industry only hires part-time minimum wage help without spending a dime on their training, people should feel grateful that those sales associates speak to clients at all.

The last time I went to one of those big box hardware stores, a female customer service representative convinced me to try the self-checkout lane. It didn't take much convincing because there was only one other cashier open and customers were lined up 5 deep in that aisle. She guided me through the process of scanning the items, passing them over the security code remover and I got to swipe my own credit card. I told her that I felt like I was stealing her job. She said no, that this system lowered costs for everyone and we were all better off, which reminded me a little of a Big Brother pronouncement. I have to give her credit because she sounded as if she meant it but I suspect that management must be monitoring what she says to clients.

That last is no idle comment. A friend of mine in Toronto, another IT industry cast-off, works the occasional part-time minimum wage shift at that same chain and he tells me that employee handbags, purses and parcels, etc, are inspected when they leave the store. The turning on and off of the overhead lights and piped-in music are centrally controlled by head office somewhere in the U.S. (I think this is called supply-chain management but I might be wrong.) If they are willing to go to the length of programming the overhead lights of all their stores from a central corporate computer, I have to assume that management is listening in on what their employees are saying to each other and their customers. If I worked there, I would assume that I never had any privacy while on the premises.

As for her comment that we all were better off because of the cost-reducing measures, well, maybe the company owners were better off having to pay fewer salaries, but I fail to see how anyone else is. I am doing someone else’s job and not getting paid for it so what good does that do me, exactly? And the poor sap whose job I inadvertently stole is sitting at home rotting their brain out watching afternoon television; that can’t be good either.

Those stores are managed in a very peculiar manner, it seems to me. On the one hand they call their clerks associates or something similar in a pathetic attempt to avoid calling them something apparently demeaning like, well, clerk, I suppose. But on the other hand, as described to me, the policy in these stores is to preferentially hire part-time employees; they cost so much less in terms of statutory obligations, benefits, etc. Moreover, they seem to be careful about not assigning too many hours to any one employee. I wonder if this might be a way to avoid having part-timers declared de facto permanent employees by meddlesome Labour Ministry officials. Yet, at the beginning of their shift, the department managers corral their employees for a little pep talk. (My friend tells me that he and his colleagues try to avoid those if at all possible.) I have witnessed one or two of those sessions and the ones I heard were a combination of adolescent pep rally, “Let’s go get them today!” along with suggestions about how to increase sales by pushing certain items. It seems strange that management would expect part-time employees with no future to form an enthusiastic sales staff. It seems shortsighted. Maybe even stupid.

In the old days, we had a choice of many hardware stores to go to and we could avoid the ones owned by rude jackasses. We could choose to bring our business to store owners who knew what they were selling and could give us advice on installing the things we bought. In short, there was competition. Lately the large corporate retail chains have taken over the market and there are very few independents left. According to the lady who trained me to be my own checkout associate, we’re better off.

Renting Movies

2006-01-03T23:00:00.000-05:00

Why is it so difficult to rent good movies?

There used to be a long lag time between the theatre release of a movie and its subsequent VHS release. This lag time shortened as the years went by and my understanding of the reason for this is that the theatres can only profitably show a movie for a short time. Further, the studios can actually make more money from the VHS (now DVD) release than from the original theatre screenings. According to current affairs discussion programs that I have seen, the reason that they can’t make money on theatre screenings are the high carrying charges for all the mega-theatre complexes that they’ve built in the past few years.

Well, so, why did they build them? What was wrong with the old theatres? Or more to the point, why did they tear ALL the old theatres down? It makes no sense. First we’re told that the old stand-alone theatres could not make a profit. Now we’re told that the new multi-screen theatres can’t make a profit. And the new places are basically run by machines and minimum wage teenagers so costs have been cut to the bone. If no one is making any money why are they still spending millions and millions of dollars to make films then?

It reminds me a little of the banking system. First, they replaced the tellers with electronic machinery and tried to knock down the bricks and mortar branches because they cost too much to operate. Then, after they’d finished adopting modern technology to cut costs, they increased service fees because of the high cost of technology. And we go walking around every day as if we don’t notice this farce happening. Well, if they couldn’t make money before, and they can’t make money now, then how come they make so much money all the time?

Well, I can explain it. They are all lying through their teeth. Why shouldn’t they? Who is going to do the follow-up analysis to show that they are lying? Even if you could find a media outlet that would hire the reporter to write the story, would anyone read it? And even if we all read it, what penalty would they suffer?

A similar thing has happened to movie rental places. In the early days, there were mom and pop rental stores in every neighbourhood and their inventory reflected, in part, the unique tastes of the people running the stores. There was one store near my home in Toronto that carried old weird films like Fahrenheit 451 and THX 1138. I can’t find a relatively recent and popular movie like Gorky Park at any large chain rental place near me today. Free markets, which are supposed to increase our choice, end up reducing the variety of things we can buy. This is exactly opposite to what the textbooks promise. Why is that? What counter-acting force in the system of checks and balances have we inadvertently removed?

Why isn’t there a competing movie rental store in my neighbourhood that carries a large variety of movies, new and old, that intelligent adults can enjoy, instead of the corporate chain monoliths that only carry teen flicks, computer games and candy bars. Every month there is less and less floor space devoted to older movie rentals at my local rental shop. Will they carry groceries next? Lumber? Why not close down the DVD rental aisles entirely, put up a movie screen and charge admission, maybe open up a neighbourhood movie theatre.

Why can’t I rent Gorky Park anywhere? Or the original Day of the Jackal, not the infantile American remake? Or Citizen X, one of the best police procedurals ever filmed? My local store is already out of the recent Bourne Identity and its sequel. They are recent releases and they are already gone from the shelves. How can that be?

Those libraries full of free books are looking better and better all the time.

Ask and You Will Receive

2005-12-12T22:54:00.000-05:00

In a recent blog entry I expressed a wish for transparent solar panels so that we could build windows out of the material and generate electricity for our homes. Well, it turns out I was behind the times, as usual. Ted Sargent, a researcher in nano-technology and author of The Dance of Molecules (there are many Google references), has been conducting research in precisely this field and has produced some promising laboratory results. I heard an interview with him recently on CBC Radio One’s morning show, The Current.

But unlike my pedestrian wishes, he and his colleagues have gone much further and in a much more clever fashion. They have produced a photoelectric material that is sensitive to infrared radiation and not the visual spectrum. This means that it can be made transparent without losing its electrical generating effectiveness since a significant portion of the sun’s energy is transmitted in the infrared region of the spectrum. Moreover, they have produced this substance in a form that can be painted onto another material. He envisages being able to buy a can of the stuff one day and being able to simply spread it on whatever surface we need with a roller or brush, the way we now paint walls and fences. It wasn’t clear from the radio interview how one attaches electrodes to this surface to harness the energy but presumably there are details about that in his book or in his published research.

Now begins the long wait to bring this to market. Just because something is shown to be possible in laboratory conditions doesn’t automatically imply that it will be a widespread commercial success, although technology is in many ways a buyable commodity. If someone really wants to manufacture and sell this material, they can probably find a way to do so. But I am certain that there are a lot of powerful forces in our society who would not welcome such competition in energy production and they won’t be shy to act in their own best interests. In the early part of the last century GM and other automobile manufacturers conducted successful lobbying campaigns in U.S. cities to not use public transit. Technology giants have been associated with many takeovers of new technology start-ups that were never heard from again. Being good is only one small criterion for an idea’s success.

All that cynicism aside however, all I can do is sit back and marvel at what our best minds can dream up, when we allow them to.

Automobile Technology Gone Mad

2005-12-09T10:48:00.000-05:00

In a previous entry, I made some remarks about an intelligent cruise control feature found on a luxury vehicle that I had read about. The automobile can adjust itself to the speed of traffic ahead by using radar to modulate its own speed. I wisecracked that car-jackers could simply pull in front of one of these, gradually slow down and the car would obediently slow right down behind them, making it easy for the crooks to steal it.

Today I read a review of a prestige German luxury car that has a similar feature but that goes one better. The reviewer said that that car could actually sense stopped traffic and gradually come to a halt behind the immobile cars, without the driver needing to touch the brake pedal. It accomplishes this while not slowing too abruptly so as to avoid being rear-ended by the guy behind who may still be driving his car using his own arms and legs, the poor sap.

I like neat toys as much as other boys, but honestly, if you don’t like driving, why buy a car?

I can imagine the lawsuits of the future. Presumably, like cruise control in current vehicles, this version of it must be turned on but somewhere, probably in some U.S. state where settlements from lawsuits are a major source of income for lawyers, someone will forget to turn the cruise control on and will not put his foot on the brake pedal when traffic comes to a stop. After maiming himself and others he will claim that the car lulled him into not using the brakes and will sue the manufacturer. From that point on, instead of doing the sensible thing and removing this idiotic device from their cars, manufacturers will instead make active cruise control the default mode and will also lobby the U.S. government into making it mandatory.

The process is probably similar to the one that will require tire pressure monitors in all cars in the near future. Is it so difficult to figure out that your tires need air? I have it on good authority that the trigger point for these monitoring systems is set at some ridiculously low threshold like 25% so that even with it, you may end up with pressures as low as 24 psi, when they should be 32 psi, before you are warned about the situation. That is long past the point at which action is needed, so what is the purpose, other than an opportunity to make a profit on something useless that we are mandated to buy?

I believe three things are going on. First, people are becoming stupider and more helpless every day. This is no accident. It is actively encouraged by our social institutions because a lot of people benefit from widespread helplessness and stupidity. Second, there is probably great profit in these electronic features. Although we are barraged by media spin about their high cost the fact is that in high production numbers electronics is dirt-cheap. Walk around your house to see what I mean. It’s filled with cheap beeping devices that do remarkable things. Third, these systems are difficult to repair or test and that is a big advantage to car builders because it makes it that much easier to write off a car in case of a collision. Every written-off automobile is another sale to the industry so anything they can do to facilitate the early demise of your car benefits them in an immediate and tangible way.

If we were serious about road safety we wouldn’t let teenagers drive 3 ton SUV’s without adequate specialized training. We wouldn’t allow the sale of 300 horsepower sports sedans to someone just because their cheque cleared. We wouldn’t allow the sale of ATV’s and snowmobiles that can reach 100 kph. If we were serious about safety we would mandate advanced driver training to teach people how to handle skidding cars in all kinds of weather and we would require that they PASS these courses, not just attend. If we were serious we would require people to put in an active personal effort into learning so important a skill. Instead our institutions sell us parlour tricks and we buy them.

For the time being, keep using those brake pedals.

Coffee?

2005-12-05T20:20:00.000-05:00

Over a dozen years ago I was invited to a dinner party in Toronto. After the meal, which was vastly more interesting than the other guests, the host offered coffee. I try to avoid drinking coffee late in the day because it interferes with my sleep but I figured that I needed some help getting through the rest of the evening. He poured it into my mug, I added cream and sugar, tested it for taste and very nearly gagged.

He had served flavoured coffee. Without warning anyone first.

Sometime in the last couple of decades peculiarly tasting hot dark beverages, whose creators claimed were based on coffee, began to find their way out of the chemical laboratories in which they were invented onto store shelves and coffee house counters. I don’t know how anyone could imagine that an artificially flavoured hazelnut-Irish-cream-de-menthe tasting brew had anything to do with coffee but it isn’t the first time that marketers have attempted to peddle something that should have been flushed into the septic tank.

I am not an extremist. I don’t advocate jailing the people who brew or sell or even those who drink the stuff. I don’t even go so far as to require that they go outside and sneak a cup or two like we force cigarette smokers to do. I would, however, make an exception for the imbeciles who use the non-flavoured coffee grinder in grocery stores to prepare their foul flavoured powder. Them, I would send to prison.

I ask only two things of those who like the crap. One, stay at least two metres away from my nose when you’re drinking it and please, please, don’t kiss me afterward. Two, find another name for it. Call it artificially-caffeine-enriched-chemically-flavoured-hot-beverage or invent some phony marketing name the way Hagen-Das did, but stop calling it coffee. You are insulting people who have taste

I don’t know what that warm brew is, but I know what it isn’t. And it isn’t coffee.

Hunt for a Good Croissant

2005-12-04T11:52:00.000-05:00

During a telephone conversation with an old friend and colleague yesterday evening I was reminded of an on-again/off-again mission that I have been on for the last several years to try and find a good croissant. I would never have guessed how difficult a task it would be.

The search began as a bit of an in-joke between my wife and I. As we traveled to various places in the country we realized that we were often near many of the historic Canadian railroad Chateaux that were built in the last century. We made a point to have afternoon tea at the Banff Springs Hotel, breakfast at the Chateau Frontenac in Québec City, a couple of après-hike snacks at Chateau Lake Louise and sampled the croissants at each one figuring that prestige hotels such as these would naturally hire excellent pastry chefs. By and large I have been disappointed. They were just ok in Banff, very good but absurdly over-priced in Québec, so-so in Lake Louise but we were shocked to find that the Manoir Richelieu coffee shop in Malbaie did not even offer them on the menu. No croissants in Québec! I was appalled, and to make things worse, their coffee was awful. We have been meaning to stop in at the Montebello now that we live in Eastern Ontario but we never seem to be in its vicinity at a convenient time. To my shame, although we now live in Ottawa, we have never been to the Chateau Laurier to sample their puff pastry.

I have to say that the trend seems to have turned downward ever since that large hotel chain has taken over the Chateau properties. I don’t know if this is as a result of the usual corporate cost cutting imposed by a rookie V.P. Marketing trying to show his mettle, or whether it’s an American-based misunderstanding of the importance of good food. I hate to generalize like that but when I taste evidence to the contrary, I’ll change my mind.

I have tried different coffee shops and bakeries around town both here and back in Toronto, and although I have been occasionally pleasantly surprised, I am more usually disappointed. Generally, the smaller independent places have the better tasting samples but not consistently so. Coffee shop chains have consistent products but tend to worsen in taste as the chains increase in size, popularity and price. It’s an odd inverse relationship. It is as though as the corporations get larger, their supply chains become more sophisticated as they hire more and more professional logistics experts but simultaneously stop including in-house taste experts in the meetings. I suspect that much the same happened at GM over the years as they hired more and more M.B.A. financial gurus but stopped talking to people who actually own and drive cars.

But good food crops up in unexpected places. While visiting the National Gallery here in Ottawa one Sunday we stopped in at their cafeteria for a snack and I ate one of the best croissants I have even eaten anywhere.

Lately I have discovered the croissants from the bakery section of a local independent grocery chain. They are excellent, close to home, and inexpensive, a deadly combo. At first, the deep colour of their pastry caught my eye but they had also posted a sign that boasted 100% butter croissants. It’s a mystery to me why anyone would bother making croissants without butter. Is it a way to save a few pennies on cheaper ingredients? What would be the point of that, I wonder? Croissants are not a staple and I don’t eat them for their fibre content or nutritional value. Satisfying my lust for their taste is the only reason to eat them. They serve no other purpose so if the taste is removed, well, why eat them?

It’s possible that over the years, health nazis have intimidated people into not enjoying the good things in life and I have unfortunately met many of these people. Sitting down for a meal or a snack with them is akin to attending a Puritan worship service. I knew a fellow once who literally sneered when I mentioned eating pork chops, as if eating meat had somehow become bad. Of course it is not a good nutritional idea to eat two inch thick steaks twice a day your whole life, but please don’t try to convince me that eating a steak once a month is bad for me. At that point it ceases to be a discussion of health, it becomes one of religion.

There is a particularly silly statistical tactic often used in these arguments that truly offends me. As a reason for eating more healthfully (whatever that means), I have been quoted data that a typical North-American diet includes too much meat and fat.

So what?

I am not a statistical sample. I will not magically absorb the bad health of my neighbour by osmosis. The only food that affects my health is the food that enters my mouth. It is utterly irrelevant to my body what others eat. This is not a difficult concept to understand. It doesn’t matter to me one bit if 99% of North Americans eat more fat than is good for them. The only thing that matters to me is whether I do or not, so put the damn butter back into the croissants.

Primates

2005-11-28T22:38:00.000-05:00

I recently heard an interview with Dr. Robert Sapolsky on CBC Radio One. He is a scientist and researcher at Stanford University who has spent a long time studying baboons and has written a book called Monkeyluv: And Other Lessons on our Lives as Animals. He draws parallels between baboon society and how we humans go about living our lives. I only heard parts of the piece but the entire interview can be heard here.

Among other things, he pointed out the connection that is often made between a female baboon’s crimson red bottom, when receptive to males, and our own love of lipstick and other make-up. He is not the first to discover this out but reviewers point out his particular flare when writing about the topic.

When the radio interviewer asked what he thought was the most striking resemblance between the lower primates and us, he mentioned two things. One was their ability to tenderly care for and nurture one another. The other was a seemingly innate ability to be vicious, duplicitous and sadistic with a nasty habit of taking out their frustrations and anger on smaller weaker individuals within their group. Sound familiar?

He spends several months per year watching baboons interact with one another and made some interesting observations. According to him, they spend only about three hours each day gathering and eating the food they need to survive. Searching for food is thus not a constant stress in their lives, at least not for the baboon groups that he studied on the Serengeti. Also, he noticed that although a lone baboon can be at risk from attack from leopards or other predators, it is by and large a very minimal risk in their daily life. For one thing, they almost always travel in large groups. For another, predators such as the large cats prefer hunting antelope and other prey that tend not to fight back so viciously as a baboon can. Since baboons tend to sleep for long periods of time, up to 12 hours per day, his point is that baboons could in theory lead relatively un-stressful lives: sleep for 12 hours, eat for 3 and relax for the remaining 9. All in all, not a bad life.

However, it turns out that they don’t live like that. They have a lot of stress in their lives and 90% of it is due to other baboons. They seem to love driving each other nuts. They form gangs and beat up weaklings. They steal each other’s girlfriends. The type A males are forever trying to oust the other type A males. They form alliances with buddies to pick on some other group member, and then later stab their allies in the back when it suits them. They turn on each other as a matter of course.

As I was listening to this I couldn’t help but think that with a good body shave and some talcum powder to cover those red bums, they would fit right in any modern corporation. For example, with a little keyboard training they might be just what the call center industry is looking for as it tries to cut costs even further. I recently spoke to someone who was managing the move of his company’s call center from India to Manila. Apparently, the Indian dime-a-day flunkies had priced themselves out of the market so his firm had to look for cheaper terrain. Maybe that cheaper terrain is in Manila today but where to go next when those guys start asking for free coffee and bathroom breaks?

I had some problems installing a new version of anti-virus software on both my networked computers a few weeks ago. I run vanilla environments, nothing out of the ordinary, and I could not get the downloaded setup utility to work. As instructed, I emailed the technical support center some very detailed descriptions of what I had done and what had gone wrong. I received a long-winded emailed response telling me to try all those same things that their web site had already told me to do and that I had already tried. Any baboon could have been taught to cut/paste a canned answer and click on reply. In the end, I asked for a refund then went to the store and bought the boxed version of the identical software. It installed just fine. I can’t help but wonder if the baboons haven’t already made their way up the corporate ladder farther than we think.

Inventions We Really Need

2005-11-26T15:59:00.000-05:00

I was reading about a very expensive luxury car the other day whose outside rear-view mirrors have little puddle lights on their underside that illuminate the ground near the doors so that the well-heeled purchasers of these cars can avoid stepping into mud or dog droppings with their expensive shoes. The expensive shoes, however, are not standard equipment. The car automatically adjusts the audio system’s volume and bass/treble mix to accommodate changes in speed so the owner doesn’t have to bother turning a dial. That can be a trial, I know. It also has intelligent cruise control that adjusts the car’s speed to the traffic ahead. This last feature doesn’t seem so smart to me because car-jackers will soon learn that to steal one of these, all they have to do is pull ahead of one and gradually slow down and the damn thing will obey their command. Why it would occur to an engineering design or marketing group that anyone would actually care to own such frivolous options is beyond me. Maybe they are the result of market demand but it seems to me that you would have to be one really rich or really bored customer to even dream up the need for such features. If you’re that rich, hire a chauffeur.

Maybe I am out of step but I think that it is a pretty sad commentary that the best ideas that present day designers and inventors can come up are childish toys. Automotive options aside, the best evidence of this over-indulged and misdirected design effort have to be the astonishing and ridiculous array of telephones on the market today. Do we really need that many models? Do we really need a new phone every 6 months?

All the best evidence suggests that innovators and creative thinkers do their best work before they reach thirty. If that‘s the case, I am way past my prime so rather than waste my time and money coming up with unworkable ideas, my time may be better spent pointing out what we need and leave it to others to research, design and build the things. Here are some ideas. Get to work.

We need semi-transparent photoelectric cells. If we had those we could replace every window on earth with a mini-power generating station. There are lots of windows in the world. I think it’s safe to say that in our western culture at least, certainly in northern climes, we have far more windows than we have human beings. There are several per house and office and industrial buildings have even more of the things. Imagine if each of those were generating 10-15 watts of electrical energy that was connected to a household power inverter that fed the energy back into the electrical utility’s grid. You can already buy 5 to 50 watt portable photocell panels at hardware stores that can keep your car battery charged up or provide power for cottage appliances. Home power inverters are advertised in all home energy and construction magazines, so I am not advocating pie in the sky. Our homes and office buildings are already pre-wired for electricity, cable TV, computer networks, and intercoms and may soon have Big Brother viewer stations in every room if some maniacs have their way. Would it be so difficult to add more copper wire and a few connectors? We might end up putting the coal, nuclear and gas-fired generating stations out of business. Isn’t that what energy deregulation was all about?

What’s the one thing than all modern downtown cores have in common? It’s wind. Why aren’t there electricity generating wind turbines at the top of every office and apartment building? It’s windy up there all the time. There are already small footprint household wind turbines on the market, designed and built in Quebec, that sell for reasonable amounts of money that can produce enough power to feed power to four average sized houses. Even if that’s a marketing exaggeration, the fact that the amount of available power is even in that ballpark should have sparked everyone’s interest by now. If that kind of innovation is already available to the consumer, then putting up industrial units at the top of major buildings should not be that difficult. Of course it requires some modifications to our infrastructure and construction codes, but considering the upside that seems like a small price to pay. Technologically, it isn’t more difficult than sending trains from England to France in a tunnel or building a bridge to PEI, or sending humans to the moon.

Often it’s not what needs to be invented but why we don’t use items that already exist. Why do 90% of our households have round doorknobs? Simple handle-shaped alternatives have been available at reasonable prices since, well since I have been alive at least, but we don’t seem to use them much. Healthy people have trouble using round ones when they are wet or slippery so imagine the difficulties they present to people in our society with handicaps. To someone with arthritis, who might otherwise be living a perfectly normal life, or to someone who has had a stroke, a round doorknob must seem like a pretty stupid design idea.

Our society is going to need a new product sometime very soon. More and more municipalities are either implementing or planning to implement separate collection of organic waste. This means that the stuff left over from all of our meals is going to be clumped together in a separate container sometime soon, where it will have a chance to mingle, rot and ferment unmitigated by the presence of intervening plastic bags, pieces of paper, or other items that serve to keep the bacteria and food molecules apart, at least to some extent, until the next garbage pick-up day. What I have been doing for years with cantaloupe rinds, an especially odorous waste item, it to keep them in the freezer till the night before garbage day. This gives me the idea that it would be very handy to have outdoor solar-powered coolers in which to store organic waste. It need not freeze the food, but merely needs to cool it sufficiently enough, for about a week or so, to prevent our neighbourhoods from becoming breeding grounds for sewer rats or worse. The basic design idea can be used for solar-powered patio beer coolers so right off we have a value-added benefit that everyone can understand, unlike the myriad options on cell phones that no one remembers how to use.

Absent But Have Not Forgotten

2005-11-16T21:12:00.000-05:00

This is just a short note to let you know that I have not disappeared. I recently started a part-time contract job that has temporarily become more than full-time. This has taken me by surprise and so I find myself with little free time. The situation should resolve itself soon as my employers are taking on other part-time help so that I will soon be able to off-load some of my clients.

During this unplanned activity, I have unexpectedly sold my car and have spent what little free time I had left trying to find a replacement. That search will end tomorrow as I am bored with searching and will buy the first used car that starts, runs well and that doesn't stink. My part-time job involves hanging around used cars a lot and I am disgusted at the smell in some of them.

With regard to other matters, the double-edged blades are working out much better than I had hoped. (Please see earlier blog entries if you don't understand that reference.) I have not had this close a shave in years.

Movements

2005-11-03T22:28:00.000-05:00

Back when I worked at a regular job, I would occasionally look out the window (when I had a window) and wonder where everybody was going. Regardless of the time of day the streets seem to always be full of people walking or driving somewhere. There is always someone going to their doctor or dentist, or salesmen calling on clients, but could there be that many, I wondered? Why weren’t they all working at their desks, like I was?

I recently began working on an assignment that involves traveling during normal office hours, visiting various automobile dealerships around the city. So, I have become one of those people who I used to watch and wonder about, and I can now tell you where we are all going. For the most part, we are looking for good coffee and clean toilets.

Finding a good cup of coffee isn’t so difficult these days, at least not in built-up areas near cities and towns. But that other thing is not so easy to find. When you work in an office the tendency is to take a clean washroom for granted. No matter what the employees get up to in there, magically the place is clean again the next morning. But when you don’t have an office clean privacy is not so easy to come by. Gasoline stations don’t have washrooms anymore unless they are on a major highway. Restaurant and donut shops have facilities but they expect you to buy something; there’s nothing wrong with that but I find that I need to use a washroom more often than I need a donut or club sandwich.

There used to be an expression, executive washroom, that I don’t hear much anymore. The term was often used pejoratively but the concept makes perfect sense to me. Once you have position and power, the first thing you want to avoid is sharing those special moments with strangers. It’s why the washroom doors in our homes have locks. It never struck me as a communal activity, which is why I don’t expect to join the military or visit a nudist resort anytime soon. Years ago I read somewhere that since the intention of a nudist colony is to dispense with bodily shame, their public lavatories are very public indeed. No need to be ashamed, I suppose, but I don’t really want to watch others. Or be watched.

It’s not a coincidence, I believe, that no washroom privacy is granted to prisoners in jails. It’s just the flip side of the coin that allows executives to claim the need for exclusive-use plumbing.

There were two interesting news stories that caught my interest a dozen or more years ago and that occurred a few weeks apart. The first was about a riot that had taken place in a women’s prison somewhere in Canada. When it was over, reports revealed that male guards and police had participated in the ending of the riot and part of that operation involved stripping the female inmates to bare skin in order to properly search for weapons. There was widespread uproar, at least in the media, about the insensitivity of subjecting naked female prisoners to the view of male guards. In an unrelated incident several weeks after that episode, a male inmate in another Canadian prison protested, and may have launched legal action, to prevent female guards from watching him rid himself of bodily waste. His need for privacy collided with her right not to be discriminated against on the job on the basis of sex. Her right trumped the prisoner’s delicate sensibilities and she can now stand there and watch him all she wants. It seems to me that the need for guards, that are in the middle of breaking up a prison riot, to be certain that the inmates have no concealed weapons is probably greater than the need to supervise normal daily toilet functions. But the beauty of political correctness is that it doesn’t necessarily need to make sense.

I had an idea for a business the other day. I dub it a C&C, short for Can & Couch, which is sort of a take-off on B&B. People could open up their private homes to guests who could use their private facilities and then maybe sit on their couch to watch television or take a nap. There are a lot of people like me, traveling the streets all day long, who could use a clean quiet break in the middle of the day but prefer something less public and more restful than a donut shop or mall food court. Such a service might be worth say $5, maybe $10 if they had satellite television, or even more if the coffee was especially good.

Exoneration

2005-10-31T20:47:00.000-05:00

(My apologies to non-Canadian readers as this entry refers to a specific money spending scandal that occurred in the federal government in Ottawa. I am sure that you have some of your own, no matter where you live.)

Well, they conducted the audit of Dingwall’s three quarter million expense account. The Globe and Mail reported, “An audit of former Royal Canadian Mint head David Dingwall's expenses concludes that the former Liberal cabinet minister did not spend money improperly during his tenure.” This means that he crossed all the t’s and dotted all the i’s.

Good. I feel so much better now.

The signal has been sent. The rest of the boys and girls in similar jobs now know to keep their snouts below about the half to three quarter million mark and no one will even notice.

Is he going to get his job back, then, since he did nothing wrong or will he get his entitlement/severance? I’d go for the half million severance, myself. If I could snare that kind of cash I’d quit jobs all the time.

Cheap(er) Gas Again

2005-10-25T20:41:00.000-04:00

Several weeks ago, I wrote a few words about the gasoline price fluctuations that were attributed to the damage to oilrigs and refineries after hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the U.S. Gulf Coast. Last Friday I filled my tank at less than 89 cents per litre here in east Ottawa, which is less than what I was paying in the weeks before the storms. We seem to be in a glut again. They must have fixed those refineries really quickly. What other explanation could there be?

Home Renovation

2005-10-23T11:09:00.000-04:00

A lot of what’s on television is insipid and inconsequential but I believe that home renovation programs are pure evil. I don’t know which was the first but the earliest one I remember was the one that Bob Vilas hosted. Were it up to me, Bob would be in prison. They would have to build a new wing onto the jail to host all the TV hosts that I would throw in there and as added punishment I would require them to watch their own programs all day long.

I have had to do both minor and major home renovations in every house that I have purchased. Some of that work is inevitable because things simply wear out and break. There is no escape from that and in each case you have to judge whether you can do the work yourself or whether you need professional help. I can accept that, that’s just life. But I am sick and tired of having to redo the repair work of incompetent previous owners that were too stupid to realize that they were out of their depth or too cheap to hire someone competent. Regardless of what work needs to be done or why, it is a dirty time-consuming chore and there are at most one in a hundred of us who have the skill or patience or time to do a good job. I personally hate doing that kind of thing and am not ashamed to admit it.

Don’t get me wrong. I have several friends and family members who really enjoy hands-on repair or renovation work and I have nothing but admiration for them. They can come over to do my repair work anytime they like. By all means, do what you enjoy, but my guess is that people who know what they are doing do not waste their time watching guys on TV. They do not fall for the con. They can tell when a job can be done in a day or whether it will take half the summer. They know when a project is too big for a single amateur to undertake alone.

I think what often happens is that people who have never used a tool in their lives, and they are legion, watch renovation telecasts and convince themselves that the work is easy to do. Sitting on a couch eating chips, they watch some smiling guy in clean overalls rebuild a basement family room in 30 or 60 minutes. I guess they think that the poor sap is hammering away like crazy during the commercials. Listen suckers, the reason the camera is taking narrow angle close-ups of the host is because they don’t want you to see the army of 20 or so paid professionals in the background who have been doing all the real work for the past month. Don’t fall for it. They are not there to help you repair your house; they are filler for the commercials that try to sell you expensive table saws and routers that you will not know what to do with once you bring them home from the sponsoring store.

If you have a full-time job it usually means that half your weekend is taken up with doing the laundry or driving your kids to hockey arenas. The reality is that with only 10-15 free hours per week, the simplest renovation project can last a very long time. A project that a team of professionals can do in 4 days could easily take a year to do if you are alone and only able to devote a few hours once per week to the task. Do you want to live in a construction zone for a year?

I had to replace the washroom medicine cabinet in the first house that I owned in Toronto. Conceptually, this is an easy task. The old cabinet was recessed into the wall so I was prepared for some dry wall repair before laying the new cabinet over the space. However, what a previous owner had done was to cut through the supporting wall studs to make room for the deeply recessed medicine cabinet. Anyone with sense would have bought a different model but instead this mouth-breather had chosen to destroy the inner wall structure so that when I removed the cabinet I found myself staring at the house’s outer brick. It took me a couple of days to rebuild the underlying support taking extreme care not to break through the brick work, add in a section of dry wall before screwing in the new cabinet. A four-hour job had mushroomed into a 2-day nightmare and I lost a weekend of my life doing something I hate.

In a subsequent house, I lived with a bad faucet leak in the washroom tub because the previous owner had installed exotic brass plumbing without also purchasing spare parts or leaving a panel in the wall behind the plumbing for easy access. In ten years of searching I could not find replacement seats or faucet inserts that would fit. And because the area was completely tiled over, and there were no extra tiles stashed in the basement, ripping the wall apart to replace the entire assembly would have meant remodeling the entire bath area. A mere $5 faucet insert replacement would have required a $5000 rebuild of the bathroom. I am convinced that if the previous owner had not watched Vilas or any of his cohorts on TV, he would never have done anything so stupid. (And by the way, although those brass handles are gorgeous in the showroom, at home they only really look good for about 48 hours after polishing them with smelly chemicals. For the rest of the year, they look awful so unless you have a maid or you deeply enjoy housework my advice is to stay away from them.)

I became incensed over an episode of Vilas’ program one evening. He was renovating an old New England farmhouse that the owners were converting into their primary residence. Most of the episode was focused on repairing one window. He had fallen in love with the fact the wooden window frame was made of 100+ year old hardwood, the bottom third of which had rotted. Instead of replacing the window he opted to chisel out the rotten bits, went to great lengths to find sections of matching hardwood and carefully joined the new sections to the old frame to make the repair appear seamless. This meant removing caulking and the historic glass, which he also wanted to preserve, and subsequently re-assembling it all. Of course on TV it looks as though all that can be done in 20 minutes but anyone who has ever done this kind of work knows that an entire weekend would not be enough time to do what he had just described. Who has the time or inclination to spend a whole weekend fixing one window in order to avoid the destruction of a couple of feet of historic wood? It’s not a museum you maniac, it’s someone’s house!

There are a several renovation programs on television these days where the focus is less on repairing structural problems and more on re-decorating rooms for fashion purposes, as though it were the equivalent of replacing your bell-bottoms with wool leggings. I have nothing polite to say about those shows.

Scraping Face

2005-10-22T14:41:00.000-04:00

(Please see this and this for previous discussions on the topic.)

A reader of this blog has kindly sent me an old-fashioned double-edged razor along with some blades. In the past few weeks, out of curiosity, I had searched for these in stores and was only able to find blades but not razors. Double-edged blades are the least expensive on the market and I wanted to try using them again to see what I had given up 25 years ago. He and I had exchanged emails about the matter and he found one somewhere and sent it along.

I tried using it this morning and I was pleasantly surprised. It cut everything off my face that it needed to and glided as smoothly as anything else I have ever used so I am now wondering why I ever switched. Given that the blades for this razor are the cheapest on the market I will probably stick with them. Here’s my thanks to Allan, you know who you are.

This got me to thinking that if I wrote a blog entry or two complaining about car troubles that I have had, then maybe some kind soul out there might send me a new car.

Monsters

2005-10-18T21:49:00.000-04:00

Most of us can probably recall some irrational fears from our youth. As far back as I can remember I have heard references to monsters hiding under the bed or behind the closed closet door. Many movies have used this mythology to scare people for years and the scenes have become movie-watching clichés.

I remember one specific fear from my childhood. I was always scared that there was a gorilla hiding behind the shower curtain while using the commode. I have no idea how or why this started, but it was probably a scary movie about gorillas that did it to me. You can appreciate how awkward it would be for a monster to appear at that particular moment. Monsters are not nice at the best of times but when you’re sitting there with your pants down around your ankles, it makes even running away problematic. But I am certain I never rationalized it that way at the time and that’s just my adult brain looking for a sensible reason to be worried about something that couldn’t possibly happen. But that’s what irrational means.

The movie, The Exorcist, was released in 1973. I never got around to seeing it until I rented the tape about ten years after its release but I did read the book. That was one spooky story. I don’t know whether it affected non-Catholics the way it did me, but I remember my imagination working overtime and I was over twenty by then. A good friend of mine at the time told me that he left the light on when he went to sleep the night after seeing the film.

Christian belief teaches us that Satan is the personification of evil. It’s interesting that we would even want to personify evil in any way but I guess it’s easier to relate to it that way. Concepts are more difficult to grasp than drooling demonic monsters. I like the way that popular stories tend to portray the devil as wickedly clever, as though there naturally is some suspicion about someone who is maybe just a little too smart. In my youth it was fashionable to discard many beliefs and belief in the existence of evil was one of the ideas that we were eager to throw out. Thirty years later I have a difficult time not believing in evil.

So what scares you now that you’re an adult? I don’t mean what real fears keep you up at night. The real ones are obvious and all too frightening. Is there a cell in your body that’s getting ready to go nuts and kill you? Is there a virus catching a ride with a mosquito down the block that could cause your innards to rot after the bug bites you? These things can really happen. But what irrational fears nag at your brain?

I can tell you about one peculiar thought that often bothers me. Tuesday is the normal garbage pick-up day for my street and sometime during the day on Tuesday, almost every Tuesday, I will wonder about how I would manage if that mountain of stinking rat bait were still sitting by the curb when I got home. And when I arrive home on Tuesday’s, I always feel a real sense of relief to see that the stuff is gone. What would we do if they stopped picking it up and just left it there?

Immortality

2005-10-14T13:58:00.000-04:00

Macleans published a special edition last week titled The Next 100 Years. It coincides with the 100th anniversary of the newsmagazine and contained articles looking back at important Canadian events of the last century, along with reflections and predictions of what the next hundred years may be like. Some of the historical review articles were very interesting, but the articles speculating on the future were the most fun to read. The predictions cover a lot of ground but nano-technology, artificial intelligence and humanoid robots, i.e. cyborgs and androids, are widely believed to play an important role in mankind’s future.

I am of a divided mind when it comes to artificial intelligence. Computers have changed the way we live, making some things easier but at a cost that we have probably not yet fully calculated. It’s nice to be able to email anyone at any time, but is it fun being on an electronic leash 24 hours a day? Having worked in software development for over two decades, I can’t say that I am impressed with the concept of artificial intelligence. Mostly I regard computers as examples of artificial stupidity. All those years of reading compiler messages telling me that a 16-bit word variable may not be appropriate and didn’t I really need a 32-bit variable always angered me. If the damn thing knows what’s wrong why doesn’t it just fix it and shut up.

I have already hinted at what I think is really the future for cyborgs in a previous blog entry. Most people believe that a large part of the driving force behind the growth of the web, especially high-speed access to it, has been pornography. It stands to reason that once we can build reasonable facsimiles of human beings, personal gratification will be high among the design specifications. You may smirk when they read that last sentence, but in your heart of hearts, you know I’m right. Why would anyone waste $30,000 buying a robot that will just do housework? The possibilities boggle the mind. Should the system supply sexual service androids to men in prison? Could robots completely take over the prostitution industry? There would be clear advantages over humans, easier disease control, no need to sleep, and no emotional baggage other than that which is simulated for desired effect. Should society allow the construction of androids to satisfy currently illegal perversions and fantasies? And if not, why not? I feel myself to be a little over my head on this topic and it would take a novelist of Margaret Atwood’s stature to properly explore these themes.

But the controversies don’t end with sex. There is already dismay over computer games in which kids can shoot others and steal their money. Will we be able to go to a fantasy camp in the future where we can rape, torture and kill androids, just for the pleasure of doing so? We know there would be a market for the service. Since no humans would be harmed, what would be the compelling argument to prohibit this? What moral value would this violate that we would not conveniently explain away to make a buck?

The Macleans articles also dealt with the implications of modern technology to human health and longevity. Scientists speculate on whether a kind of immortality might become possible either by prolonging our body’s lifespan or by finding ways to merge our psyches with highly advanced computers. We live in a world in which it’s difficult to book an appointment with a doctor in time to actually figure out what’s wrong before it’s too late, so the notion that these complex life-prolonging techniques will be widespread is comical to me. But to be fair, economies of scale may prevail. Maybe we’ll have cheap immortality products that you can pick up at a discount store. They would not have all the bells and whistles of the competing high-end products at the Mayo clinic, of course. For example, they may allow you to live an extra 50 years but you’ll have to wear ugly plaid polyester pants for the duration.

Immortality sounds good to us. Why is that? I suspect that deep down, a lot of people believe that their presence on earth is good for the world, that others want and maybe even need them around. That’s a pretty big self-serving assumption. Just think for a moment about some twerp you work with, or maybe an in-law who particularly irritates you; do you want them to live forever? I bet they do. But could we all live forever? Are there enough resources on earth to support that? Would we have to stop human reproduction to accommodate all the immortals? Maybe sex androids could help with that problem for a while but the desire to reproduce is a powerful primeval instinct. Are you willing to give up having and loving your own children just so that jackass down the block who lets his garbage blow all over the street can live forever?

Maybe you would like to live forever, but so might Charles Manson. If he has the cash for the kit, who are you to say he can’t buy one? Even without invoking mass murderers, if you lived forever you might have to face the prospect that a lot of people you don’t like will do the same and you would have to spend eternity looking at them. That may not be the most attractive option, depending on who your friends are. On the other hand, no matter how much you dislike your neighbour, is bowing out gracefully while he continues to live, the best choice? You could just move.

A depressing thought is that if you chose to buy an immortality kit for yourself, you might have to face the prospect that the people around you would prefer that you take it back for a refund. That would be a tough thing to find out, especially at what would probably be a particularly sensitive moment in your life. It’s easy to make jokes about someone whom we would prefer not to have around forever, but what if that someone is you? But that may be unduly pessimistic. Maybe the prospect of living a really long time will have a generally sobering effect, in much the same way that an eternal vengeful god used to do. In the old days, there was an advantage in being good because you avoided eternal damnation and hellfire. If people knew that they would to have to deal with the same faces for the next three centuries, they might be nicer to one another.

I think the worst aspect of immortality is the possibly destructive effect on self-image. Once you have lived six decades and the remaining hair on your head is gray, you probably start to think of yourself as wise. After all, you look wise in the mirror. You might like being thought of as wise. But who is going to look to you for sage advice if your 150 year old neighbour has had all his body parts replaced several times and is dating teenage girls. Whose example would you want to follow?

Meetings

2005-10-12T15:58:00.000-04:00

A ritual that I miss from my last job was the regular Monday morning meeting. Most business meetings that I have attended over the years were awful but the ones at that company were well run and informative. We weren’t allowed to venture off point, everyone had a short say about what they were doing or not doing, and the meetings were short. I suspect that’s because many of the participants were in a hurry to go downstairs for their cigarette break but that’s as relevant a motivation as any.

The worst meetings are those held by people who think that they are important. During the very early 1980’s, while working at Inco Ltd, I attended a reorganization meeting of the 3-person sub-department in which I worked. The overall IT group consisted of 3 sub- groups along with their 3 corresponding managers. They would occasionally shuffle the 3 managers, changing which sub-group they headed. The department head would treat these meetings with much solemnity. At the end of one of them, after we 3 grunts had been shown an organizational chart with newly re-labeled boxes, he made the mistake of asking us what we thought. One of the three, not me, quietly and calmly stated that if they shuffled the boxes around often enough then statistics dictated that they would eventually find the right combination. The fellow, Tony, who delivered the verdict was a master of deadpan and I managed to not laugh out loud. The two re-shuffled managers and the department head, which together had probably been planning this non-event for weeks, had trouble keeping the arteries in their necks from exploding. I can’t remember what they replied; by that point, it hardly mattered.

Several years later at a different company, I had some fun of my own at a meeting. We were trying to decide whether or not to cut over to a new system that the development staff had been testing internally. Because of the nature of the software and the company, no parallel user testing had been possible and we, along with our managers, were trying to decide whether to take the chance and cut over operations during the Thanksgiving weekend. My boss and I who had done most of the hands-on software conversion thought it best to go ahead with the cutover since we had run out of things to test anyway. We figured that if there were surprises lurking, they were going to show up no matter what we did so we may as well get the conversion over with and find the problems as soon as possible. Our director turned to me at one point and asked whether I thought we were ready. What I said was more or less the following: “Sure. What’s the worst that could happen? The new system might fail, we would have to backtrack costing the company a ton of money, we would be personally blamed for the fiasco, maybe get fired, perhaps get blackballed in the industry as word spread of the disaster, we would lose out careers, our families, the lives that we knew, and probably die in a gutter, destitute and broken.” At this point, a couple of those at the meeting looked at me as though I might be in need of a stress leave. I continued, “To most people on earth, that would be a step up.” Everyone had a good laugh and we finally decided to go ahead with the cutover that in the end succeeded without a hitch. However, I think that from that point on the department managers thought I was a little off kilter. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to keep people guessing though and a well-timed comment at a public gathering can go a long way.

One of the funniest and embarrassing gatherings that I attended was a residents meeting with our city councilor and the developers who had applied to do an in-fill redevelopment project in my old neighbourhood in Toronto. At one point one of the residents, a well-known local alcoholic, stood up and loudly cursed and castigated the developers for wanting to make money. He called them “money-grubbing sleazebags” and added some racial slurs for good measure. What a show that was, and all of it for free. I offer a word of advice for people who organize community meetings. It’s best to schedule them for early in the day in order to minimize alcohol consumption.

A Quick Update on Shaving

2005-10-09T13:11:00.000-04:00

Not long ago I wrote a blog article concerning the shaving evolution that has taken place during my lifetime. In it I predicted a 7-blade head within a few short years. I am happy to report that we are now more than halfway there. There is a 4-blade shaving system available right now and I saw its blade heads for sale in a store two days ago. Up till then, I was only aware of the 3-blade technology. I don’t keep an especially close watch on this industry so it’s possible that the 4-blade system has been around for a while but that I just happened to miss it. I’ll try to keep a closer eye on developments.

Automotive Advice for the Young

2005-10-07T13:02:00.000-04:00

At the time of this writing I am fifty-two years old. I do not lay claim to much wisdom, quite the contrary, but I have learned a few things about cars that I feel obligated to pass onto to younger readers. I have raced cars, competed in automobile rally for over a dozen years, officiated at motor sports competitions, and have bought, sold and rented many types of automobiles, both new and used. Although this advice is mainly aimed at young males, it probably applies more generally.

Do not waste much money on cars. You will regret it.

I have owned cheap beaters and nearly new sports cars. I did not have more fun with one than the other. I have spent a lot of money on obsessive maintenance on a few of my cars, and completely ignored the upkeep of others, only repairing what was absolutely necessary. I was not rewarded with worry-free reliability with either strategy. I have detected no correlation between money spent on purchasing or maintaining cars, and owner satisfaction. (If you don’t know what correlation is, enroll in a statistics course.)

Do not fall prey to the consumer culture around you; do not succumb to the peer pressure that results from it. I know that that by lowering your car’s suspension, buying performance kits for it or upgrading its appearance with expensive after market trinkets, you think that you are expressing your unique identify but you’re not. Take a look at the 30 friends around you in the strip mall parking lot. You are all expressing the same identity. How unique is that?

And while we’re on the subject, why do car nuts spend so much time standing around looking at each other’s cars? This is not a new phenomenon because I remember guys in my neighbourhood who did the same thing 35 years ago. Drive somewhere. It’s a car, not a statue.

When you’re young, the temptation is to blow money you don’t have on all kinds of things that seem important. You rationalize this by imagining that very soon you will be swimming in cash because the rest of the world is about to discover how important you really are and start to throw money at you. If you think this way, my advice is to stop watching Hollywood films and rock videos. The entertainment industry is just a marketing arm of the culture that is trying to get your money. The driving force behind modern consumer culture is the fostering of feelings of inadequacy. The people who sell all the crap you buy depend on you feeling bad about yourself in order to convince you that by buying just one more contraption, you will be become a more important human being. Haven’t you noticed that there is always one more thing to buy? Aren’t you suspicious that whatever you own is never good enough?

Whenever you get the urge to buy something for your car, do this. Go home, stand in front of a long mirror, drop your pants and underwear and look down. They are making fun of that. They are trying to convince you that if you buy just one more gadget, it will grow larger and everyone else will notice. In our culture we no longer measure ourselves against others by our ability to kill wild game for food but the marketers have found a way to channel your deep-seated fears of inadequacy by getting you to buy stuff that you don’t actually need. Stop it.

Try to imagine the following scenario. You have just spent $500 per wheel on a set of magnesium alloy rims that perfectly express the man you believe yourself to be. You then had to blow $500 each on four 40 series performance tires that will wear out by September. Then you had to blow another couple of thousand on various anti-theft gizmos that will drain your battery every 3 months because you’re worried sick about all the money you are leaving behind in the parking lot everywhere you go. Since it’s too expensive and risky to drive your car, you instead go to your favourite roadhouse for ribs with your buds, to eat and talk about cars. Halfway through the meal your mouth closes down on an unexpected bone and cracks a molar wide open. Within a few microseconds the searing pain is firing every neuron in your brain. A split second later, the pain reaches down your spine and legs so that you think your big toe is going to explode. At about the 20-second mark, you get the urge to cry for your mommy but catch yourself in time because you don’t want to appear too un-cool while the food is falling out of your mouth. At the 30-second mark your brain gets enough of a breather between stabs of agony to do a quick estimate of the $6000 in dental work that you’re going to need. Suddenly, the alloy wheels and tires don’t seem so important. By the one-minute mark, you cannot remember what your car looks like.

The hyperbole (look it up) in the previous paragraph is just a way of stating what should be obvious, but never is when you are young. What seems important to you today may be utterly worthless tomorrow. To paraphrase a line of Spock’s from the original Star Trek episode The Amok Time, it is not logical but it is so.

Halloween

2005-10-04T21:45:00.000-04:00

Earlier today, I noticed a Halloween decoration over a garage at the end of my block. I don’t know exactly when it was put up, but Halloween is still about a month away. It is an orange-coloured plastic thing, a flat stylized pumpkin with a moronic grin on it. It lights up at night. I don’t think it even pretends to be scary.

Why has Halloween emerged as a major event on the calendar? In past years, tellers at my bank have dressed up in ridiculous costumes on that day. Why does anyone over the age of twelve give a damn about Halloween?

What am I missing?

Ding’ed Again

2005-10-02T15:04:00.000-04:00

In yesterday’s entry I made some sarcastic remarks about the seeming delicacy with which we sometimes treat incompetent or dishonest public figures. Later in the day I read the reports in the Ottawa Citizen about the recent resignation of David Dingwall as head of the Canadian Mint under a cloud of controversy surrounding his extravagant expenses. While neither he or the governing Liberals admitted to any wrongdoing, the opposition benches had a great time this past week skewering them both. Dingwall is a former Liberal cabinet minister who was appointed to the job.

Some apologists have pointed out that it is normal for high-level executives to have lavish expense accounts, which may be true of course, but amounts such as the $5000+ restaurant tab seem excessive to me, on the surface. It may be unfair to make judgments out of context however since I haven’t seen the receipt from that meal; maybe they had really good wine.

To my mind, there are two interesting aspects to the episode. One is that, even though he is the one who resigned, he might be entitled to a severance payment. What a sweet precedent! I have resigned from many companies in my career and I would love to be able to go back and collect some cash from them. I could certainly use it and it’s a shame that many of my former employers no longer exist.

The second thing that struck me is an expense item that repeatedly appears in articles and media broadcasts and that is a $1.29 entry for a pack of gum. This gum fascinates me.

It may be entirely innocent of course. Maybe he or an assistant picked up a new briefcase or some pads of paper at Staples or somewhere and casually bought a pack of gum at the checkout counter, the way people do all the time. The gum might then happen to appear on the expense form as part of the larger purchase. This could easily be the case and if it is the whole thing is just an example of puerile reporting by a third rate hack.

But can you even begin to imagine what a cheesy slippery cheapskate he would have to be if he had personally insisted on expensing that gum. I have a difficult time imagining why someone earning what he did per hour would take time out of his day to either enter the amount on an expense form or request that his assistant do so. It’s unimaginable.

Dingwall is only the latest in a long list of porkers dipping their snouts into the public trough. There is probably already a line of boys and girls forming a line at his door hoping to be the next little piggy to be so blessed. And why wouldn’t they? The worst that can happen, if you get noticed or caught, is a couple of days of embarrassing headlines and an insulting blog entry or two. Big deal. For a few hundred thousand, you could call me lots of names.

If we wanted to really stop this kind if thing it would be trivially easy to do so. After we catch someone dipping their hand in, all we have to do is force them to give all the money back. When the heads of other departments or crown corporations see a colleague or two have to sell the condo downtown, the chalet in the Gatineau hills, and turn in the leased Lexus to the dealership earlier than planned in order to come up with the money, it would go a long way to scaring them all straight.

But no one really wants that. The political cronies don’t give a damn if history records them as being the ones to turn down the perks of office; they want the condo, the chalet and the sports car. The press certainly doesn’t want the system cleaned up. This type of scandal is manna from heaven to them. It’s easy and cheap to research, guaranteed to make headlines for days, and offers no chance of anti-press backlash. In that sense it’s a win-win-win situation. The person in question pockets the dough, the press sell papers, the television stations get to show a humbled and embarrassed public figure for a couple of days, always great visuals those, and the public gets entertained.

Big Wind

2005-10-01T08:25:00.000-04:00

It was heart wrenching to see and read about the devastation to property and people after the two hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the Gulf Coast of the southern U.S. I am not going to comment on the response of the various government officials to the disaster. Others have been doing so for weeks and there is not much more that I can add. But I will make a couple of comments about it before moving on to what I really want to talk about.

As of September 28, CNN reported that Michael Brown is still on the FEMA payroll even though he did resign as its head. He is staying on in order to help them determine what went wrong. That’s a sweet deal. The situation reminds of that advertising guy in Montreal who was skewered by the Gomery inquiry and later indicted by the authorities. As part of his community service sentence a judge ordered him to lecture on ethics at university. Now that’s punishment.

It might be sign of how passive a society we have become that these incidents have not stirred up much outrage. The lesson to be learned here may be that we no longer expect integrity and competence in our public servants. Maybe we don’t even want it. We are not angry with them for pocketing our money; we are envious of them for so boldly taking it, all the while laughing at us. We admire these guys. We wish we had their gumption. We don’t want the system fixed; we just want our turn at the trough. Or, what may also be happening is that because we learn about these events on television, we may just accept it all as entertainment, a sideshow.

The sideshow that I did want to write about is the wild gasoline price volatility that we have been experiencing in the last month or so. Here in Ottawa we have seen prices start at around 90 cents per litre, rise to $1.40 or so in the aftermath of Katrina, drop back to 98 cents last week, hover there for a few days till it shot back up to $1.14 by yesterday morning. The media fabricated a lively frenzy out of it. At one point, it’s all anyone was talking about on the radio stations around town.

One radio station tried to engineer a $6.21 fill-up day. They attempted to convince their listeners to only put $6.21 worth of gasoline in their cars and trucks on a specified day. If you look up the 6th and 21st letters of the alphabet you will have a clue about the message they were trying to convey. If I were running a gasoline station, the message that I would have received would have been to make sure to raise the price the following day because $6.21 won’t get you very far and those motorists would all have to come back for more gasoline very soon.

According to the news reports it was estimated that the U.S. temporarily lost about 5% of its refining capacity because of Katrina. I do not believe that Rita caused any significant damage. Presumably not all of the refineries were severely damaged so only a subset of that 5% would be offline for a long period of time. By itself, that statistic has no meaning. It’s only if we know how much gasoline inventory already exists that we can decide if there is, in fact, a problem at all. If there is enough gasoline in North America to last 6 months, then having to repair a few refineries for a few weeks is at best an inconvenience. It should be part of doing business, already accounted for in the oil companies’ disaster recovery plans that they paid consultants millions of dollars to devise. I would not be surprised if there were state and federal corporate subsidies to help pay for the repair. A few oilrigs in the Gulf were knocked off their moorings but there is no crude oil shortage at the moment, we have been repeatedly told.

So why did we have a price panic?

A friend suggested that they used Katrina as an excuse to shock us with $1.40 per litre prices so that $1.15 would seem like a bargain in comparison. I am not a conspiracy buff and that seems far-fetched. There seemed to be no reason at all for yesterday’s hike to $1.14 from around $1 earlier in the week but maybe it was the normal Friday morning price jump. Our federal government has conducted several studies that show no collusion between the big oil companies. It must be so, then. Perhaps what happens every Friday is that they are moving independently in unison. It's a weekly coincidence. By suppertime the local price had dropped to $1.08 so it is probably just part of the normal supply and demand cycle. More people want gasoline on Friday morning so it becomes harder to get and the price goes up. By Friday evening, they don’t need it anymore so the stations have to drop their prices to attract clientele. That’s plausible, isn’t it?

One thing that I have noticed is that the volatility has given rise to electronic curbside price boards these days, replacing the plastic numerals that had to be changed by hand. There is opportunity in everything.

Dangerous Statistics

2005-09-28T08:01:00.000-04:00

Statistics lie. I am sick and tired of hearing about how safe it is to fly in an airplane. Maybe it’s true but maybe it isn’t. I have never died in an airplane but I have never died in a car nor have I ever died walking. So far then, my own personal data on the subject is inconclusive.

My issue with airplane statistics is that, so far as I know, air travel safety statistics are arrived at based on the distance traveled by passengers. Well, jet airplanes travel at hundreds of kilometres per hour so that seems like an unfair way to make a comparison.

What if we compared methods of transportation based on passenger hours instead? I did a rough estimate of how many hours I have spent on airplanes in my life. It’s roughly 160 hours and that includes only in-flight time, not the time spent waiting in airports that cannot possibly be good for me. Perhaps 160 hours is just not long enough to get killed in an airplane. In the 30 years since receiving my driver’s license I have driven approximately 25,000 km per year, probably an underestimate. That’s a total of 750,000 km and based on a average of 50 kph, I have spent roughly 15,000 hours driving. That does not include time spent as a passenger both before and after getting my license. The 50 kph average may seem low but it tries to take into account a fair amount of city driving. These numbers ignore the time spent standing still at red lights, although you could argue that I was in potential danger just being there. In all that time I have had two minor fender benders. That seems like a pretty safe way to travel if you ask me.

I have not come up with a good way to estimate how much time I have spent walking in my life so I cannot make a direct comparison but I am fairly certain that I have spent much more time on my feet than driving and I have never had anything dangerous happen to me while walking. (And I grew up crossing streets in Montreal.) So it seems to me that walking is pretty safe too.

It annoys me when I read or hear that fewer people are killed in airplanes than in cars, as though that is supposed to mean something. Fewer people have died in space travel than have died riding bicycles; so what? A lot fewer people fly in airplanes than either drive or ride in cars. There are many people in our society who rarely fly and some that never do. Before our trip to Newfoundland last month, I had not been in an airplane since 2001 so it stands to reason that I had a much lower chance of being killed in an airplane in the last 4 years than in a car. Almost everyone either drives a car or rides in one, often many times per week. For millions of people it is a daily occurrence. Some probably drive more than they walk. It does not surprise me then that fewer people die in airplanes than in automobile accidents.

In some ways of course, the discussion is beside the point. I cannot drive to Helsinki from Ottawa, so in that sense the fact that driving there might theoretically be safer than flying there is something only a statistician would care about. Nor do I believe that flying is dangerous. It obviously is not since crashes are few and far between. But the message that flying is the safest way to travel so permeates our lives that no one ever questions it. It is just one of those homilies that most people accept and repeat. But at the same time we are inundated by media messages about the dangers of driving. It is as though someone were trying to sell me something.

Girls will be Girls

2005-09-26T12:54:00.000-04:00

The September 25th, 2005 edition of Macleans magazine had an interesting cover story titled “The female chauvinist pig,” written by Judith Timson. I will not summarize in detail what she wrote since the piece is widely accessible but I suggest that you read it, especially if you have daughters. To pare it down to the essentials that struck me, it was an examination of the present day raunchy behaviour of young women mostly those in their late teens to early twenties. It covered a wide array of sexualized public behaviour, from teenage fashion trends and provocative bar activities to internet nudity. What especially interested the author was the unabashed willingness of large numbers of women to behave very lewdly in public.

At first I thought, what’s the big deal? There has always been a subset of males who were more than willing to behave like twerps in public places, especially after drinking too much. Why are we surprised that women do the same? It is a by-product, it seems to me, of growing gender equality. Females have as much right to act like jerks as guys do. Once repressive societal mores are removed, well, what would hold them back? It’s not as if popular culture (especially television) provides many dignified role models.

The urge to let loose in public is part of modern popular culture. You can rent dozens of Hollywood movies where this is the main theme. The media have glorified the behaviour to the point where everyone more or less expects it. One need only think of the Jerry Springer show, public nudity at Mardi Gras, various Pride Day parades, etc. But I think that there was a lingering belief that it was somehow more undignified for women to behave badly than it was for males. The author told of women who were taking stripping and pole dancing lessons, others who dance nearly nude in public bars, others who willingly let themselves be photographed in these activities for display on web sites that specifically cater to the scene.

If that’s all there was to it, I would not bat en eye. As I wrote above, women have as much right to behave inappropriately as men do. In a perverse way, this could be liberating for men. I, for one, would be happy if we acknowledged that women were not necessarily the gentler sex and that maybe it is not generally true that women mature earlier and behave more responsibly than men. I have seen enough examples of the opposite in the course of my life.

Unfortunately that’s not where the story ended. Timson went on to write that the motivation for much of this female behaviour was not for its own sake but rather to gain the attention of men, and that they were willing to up the ante considerably in order to outdo each other in their aim to attract male attention. That’s the part I don’t get.

Women don’t have to walk around naked to get men’s attention. Most males spend the vast majority of their lives dateless. That’s why, after all these centuries and after the so-called sexual revolution, there is still pornography, there are still sex workers, there is lots of sex on the internet, and all those business are very profitable. If guys were going home happy and satisfied every night, that entire industry would collapse. There is perhaps one guy out of ten thousand who is so desired by females that there is competition for him. Or there should be. But apparently, modern women feel that in order to attract the men of their dreams they have to outskank each other in public. That if they don’t, the guy will move on to the next hottie in line.

Why would they think that? It does not make much sense to me. Ladies, you don’t have to go to nearly that much effort to attract guys. Mostly, all you have to do is sit there, in my experience. Maybe you won’t attract Brad Pitt that first evening, but with enough patience, eventually the right male will come along or somebody close enough to it. I can almost guarantee that you will not meet the love of your life by prancing around half-naked in a drunken lesbian dance during March break while an internet porn camera crew follows you around immortalizing your booty.

Nothing happens entirely by accident. Systems have a tendency to adapt and change in ways that always benefit someone. If the popular culture can modify women’s behaviour to dance naked in bars, that will have the tendency to drive down the price of displayable skin by increasing its supply. In the old days, Playboy, Penthouse, et al, paid top dollars to their models, especially celebrity models whose nudity commands a premium. But if you can convince party girls to show it all for beer money and then resell the images and videos to the guys at home alone glued to the web, that’s a pretty cozy arrangement. The system has conned those women into giving it away for peanuts by making them feel as if they have to compete for men in the crudest ways, while the men are at home typing their VISA numbers into web site payment screens to get access to women that they can never meet in real life. This is no accident.

The Cutting Edge of Progress

2005-09-21T12:42:00.000-04:00

I had a mustache for years but I never grew a beard, which means I have been shaving for almost 40 years. I used to watch my father use double-edged blades that were held down by two swinging doors, a mechanism that reminds me of the bay doors on NASA shuttles. I used these for a while in my 20’s but they required a double pass and I cut myself handling the bare blades. It’s best not to play with sharp things early in the morning.

I began shaving using a single edge injector system. The blades were small, thick and had only one cutting edge on them and the blade was injected into the holder. Since the user never handled the blade the system was supposed to be safer than the double-edged blades. I think we had received the injector and blade holder as a free sample door-to-door. I cannot remember any advertisements for the system but I am pretty certain they tried to tell us it was better than the traditional double-edged design. What I remember was that I used to have to do a double-pass with the blade to get a clean shave.

I tired of the soapy rigmarole and used an electric razor for several years. I have owned several of them and although they have gotten much more expensive I have never been happy with them because they never shave close enough for my taste and often give me a rash. They’re fast of course but nearly useless in hot humid weather.

At some point I received a free door-to-door sample of a twin-blade injector system whose trade name is Trac-II, I believe. I do remember the advertisements for it. Their claim was that the two blades, that were mounted parallel and very close together, would shave closer because the skin did not have time to recede before the second blade made its cut. The television commercials had nice graphics and this was years before CGI and PC’s. I used them for a long time, still do, but always have to do a double-pass, same as with the single blade system.

Late in the last century they modified the Trac-II system to have a pivoting head. According to the marketing this allowed the blade to follow the face’s contours. I used them once or twice but they also required a double-pass and so were no better that the unmodified version while costing more.

Recently they introduced a three-blade system and once again I received a free sample of the blade holder at my door. The design idea was similar to the twin-blade system except with one more blade. I tried using it but it also required a double-pass and at the extravagant price of these new blades I have decided to stick with the twin-blade technology for the moment. As well, the triple-blade head clogged up really quickly with hair and gunk and I found it a nuisance to use.

By my estimate, some time in 2012 I will receive a free sample of a 7-blade system at my door. The blade head will be bigger than a deck of cards and cost 25 dollars. Shaving will be so complex and high-tech by that time, however, that many of us will be forced to go to specialty shops to have the service performed by trained professionals. Those professionals will only be able to do this work part-time because most guys only bother to shave in the morning. The reason for this is that most men see no point in shaving after about 11:30 a.m. if no one has complained about their hair growth by then. So those professionals will have to learn other specialized talents that they can trade for cash in the afternoons and evenings. Happily by then, people in our society will be so helpless that they will need assistance in answering cell phones or turning on televisions. In fact, turning on and tuning digital car radios could become a lucrative sideline for the more ambitious squeegee kids.

I sincerely hope that our corporations will continue to invest heavily in R&D and product improvement. Where would we be without them?

The Zen of Murder

2005-09-16T10:07:00.000-04:00

The British author Michael Dibdin has written a lesser known (in Canada) but addictive series of novels featuring an Italian detective, Aurelio Zen. There are now ten in the set. I first encountered Zen in the third book of the series, Cabal, in which we find him stationed in Rome and assigned to investigate a suspicious death in the Vatican. Although the Vatican has its own mostly ceremonial police force, it is not up to task of investigating a murder and they request the aid of Rome’s police force. Zen is the unlucky officer chosen for the assignment though he tries to resist. Thus begins a bizarre trip through incompetence, corruption, ulterior motives, backstabbing, lies, and some occasional truths, all which eventually lead Zen to a kind of resolution.

Zen’s analysis of the situation is riveting, especially if you are the type of person who enjoyed Machiavelli’s The Prince. He not only reviews the basic facts and testimony surrounding the death but we are also treated to far deeper analysis. Why was he assigned the case? Is it because he’s not from Rome? Are his superiors setting him up to fail? Does anyone actually want the crime solved? Do they want a quick whitewash? At first he appears willing to comply with whatever will cause the least feather ruffling but despite that he finds himself unexpectedly trying to solve the crime.

The murky background of a corrupt political system and complicit colleagues who only want peace, quiet and a few bribes is the backdrop throughout all the novels. An interesting pattern emerges in the first five or six books. As Zen solves crimes, he is assigned to worse and worse (to him) locations and he wearily assumes, correctly, that he is being punished for his successes. In a later novel, Blood Rain, he winds up with what he considers to be the worst possible assignment, investigating organized crime in Sicily from where he makes a narrow escape with his life.

The novels are not action thrillers nor locked door mysteries. Character development and motivations are the main interests, along with an uncanny and extremely entertaining portrait of modern Italy, if not the entire modern world. There are sinister forces at play in the backgrounds of all the stories and Dibdin manages to paint a picture of an utterly corrupt society, but a believable one nonetheless. If the crime is solved in the end, the criminals are not always brought to justice.

During Zen’s introspections we learn that he sees himself as a fish out of water, a Venetian who is a bit stuck up about it, assigned to various jurisdictions throughout Italy with which he has few connections and that he admits he doesn’t like very much. He also seems unique among his colleagues in that he actually tries to do his job, though he doesn’t seem to question the motivations of those that don’t. It’s as if he sees himself as the aberration. He has a peculiar relationship with his live-in mother, though he is not at home much, at once dominated but distant. His relationships with women are never straightforward and most of the people he knows live double lives, working in seemingly normal jobs but all are involved in some kind of black market action or other on the side. Nothing is how it appears.

Zen is world weary and cynical and I am left with the feeling that he considers it a weakness on his part that he cannot go along with the flow. He seems to regard it as a personal failing that he tries to solve the crimes to which he is assigned. It could be depressingly fatalistic but Dibdin makes is very entertaining instead, all without resorting to tongue-in-cheek satire. Along with the internal workings of Zen’s mind we are also treated to some Italian history, especially as it pertains to Venice, a place with its own independent history that sees itself not quite part of the Italian mainstream. Those asides are very familiar to Canadian readers as we live every day with unique regions inside our borders.

Television

2005-09-12T09:51:00.000-04:00

Television has had some pretty low moments: Roller Derby, Pro Wrestling, season after season of sitcoms re-cycling the same tired jokes. Recently, the programmers have managed to reach even lower by televising poker tournaments. They give the players cute names like Bluffing Bob or Nevada Ned and interview them as if they were important or had something to say.

I have not been able to watch any of the reality shows of recent years but I have seen many ads for the one where the competitors are supposedly participating in some kind of bizarre worldwide race. The ads show them in various places and situations and they even show them getting onboard airplanes. Are they racing around inside the airplane? But what I keep thinking about is that they should award the trophy or prize, or whatever they get when they’re finished, to the film crews. Not only do they arrive at the destinations first, because they have to be set up and ready to film by the time the competitors arrive, but they also have to carry all their equipment there with them. In contrast, the actual competitors have it easy, it seems to me.

Now and then I receive a jarring shock by watching a comedy that has no laugh track. It doesn’t happen often. The imbecilic fake laughter is so pervasive that only when it’s missing do I realize that it exists at all. The question is why do laugh tracks exist? Isn’t the show funny enough to make you laugh on its own and if not, shouldn’t they fix it? At first look, the purpose behind having a laugh track is to coax the viewers, us, into thinking that the program is actually funnier than it is so that we will stay in our seats long enough to see the next commercial, which is the main purpose of traditional television. But I think that there is a more subtle reason. I think that it is a way of fooling us into thinking that we are not spending another evening of our lives alone with an appliance. I think that the people behind television fully understand how damaging it would be to them if we reached this stark realization. A laugh track gives us the illusion that there are others there with us, enjoying the same shows that we do, having a real life, much like the characters in the programs that we watch. It is obviously important to the television people that we feel good while watching their programs. It’s by convincing others that we are there that they make money. But they have to keep us there for hours on end and what better way to do that than to convince us that we are sitting there with a bunch of good friends sharing a laugh.

Luckily for us television is not a complete wasteland, despite the best efforts of the commercial networks to numb us into a passive electronically induced stupor. They made a mistake, you see. They got too ambitious and gave us easy and cheap access to far too many channels and thus hit a bottleneck. There simply is not enough bad programming to fill all the airtime. Independent documentary makers have been producing all kinds of interesting and intelligent films for years but have had very few outlets to show their work. Meanwhile, North American channels like TVO (Ontario’s educational channel), Tele-Quebec (TVO’s equivalent in Quebec), CBC Newsworld, PBS, among others, quietly snuck onto the airwaves. Given that their licensing mandate is to educate us, they quickly found that ready pool of good documentary films and started to show them. And they discovered that people liked them. If you look hard enough through the various television guides, past the babe and alien photos, one can find these gems. What’s more, amazingly enough, TVO broadcasts a program called Big Ideas on weekend afternoons, which is a collection of filmed lectures on a wide variety of topics, from science to foreign affairs to philosophy. Imagine that, we can watch intelligent contemporary lectures by world-renown experts in their fields for free on TV. I would advise you all to take advantage of this because it is not likely to last forever.

Years ago in an edition of the National Lampoon magazine someone wrote a satirical piece about television, titled The Telejester, if I remember correctly. The person in the spoof had the magical ability to affect what was on television by simply imagining it. While watching a speech by then President Nixon, he imagined Nixon falling forward face down on the desk with a large key stuck in his back that someone had forgotten to wind. The imagined altered version replaced the real broadcast and caused quite a stir. He started to do this more and more to a number of other television programs but the authorities finally managed to home in on his mental signal and shut him down. I keep worrying that someone in television land will accidentally watch one of those lectures or documentaries on TVO or PBS and launch a campaign to eliminate them.

Nothing happens by accident. The fact that a vast multi-billion dollar television industry exists for the purpose of peddling mediocrity implies that someone somewhere is benefiting from it. They want it this way. They have money and they have power and as soon as they wake up they will shut down all the good stuff.

Back From the Rock

2005-09-08T11:44:00.000-04:00

We recently vacationed for two weeks in Newfoundland. We spent the first week in Gros Morne National Park on the west coast where it was cool and sunny, a much-needed break from the liquid-thick humid heat that we had in Ottawa this summer. Then we spent a rainy second week on the east coast’s Avalon Peninsula, in and around St. John’s. Because of the bad weather we visited every museum and art gallery that we could find and were delighted by what we saw. And we both feel that St. John’s is probably the prettiest Canadian city that either one of us has seen.

Describing a place as large as Newfoundland after a mere two week visit is a little like judging a new job based on your initial interview, but since I cannot afford to live there for a year it will have to suffice. I will dispense with a couple of clichés first. The scenery is indeed spectacular and, yes, the people are unfailingly friendly. In Gros Morne Park the drive from Rocky Harbour to the park’s east boundary is arresting. Before the trip, a friend mentioned in an email that Western Brook Pond was probably the place where God practiced before beginning work on Eden. The photo above is a view of the Western Brook Pond fjord from its western shore. Go there.

It’s funny the effect that myths have. Our only prior knowledge of the province was gained from the media, who never report any good news. So we quite ignorantly expected to find a have-not society living a step behind the rest of the nation. Shame on us. What struck us first was that there seemed to be a lot of late model cars around and that there was a lot of new home construction. Everyone we talked to, in cafes or in B&B’s, smiled understandingly when we told them that this surprised us. Maybe we should not have listened to Toronto columnists so much because Newfoundlanders are under the impression that they are living in an economic boom and they are spending money as if they are. We were told time and again that although the cod stocks are down, crab, oil, mining, logging and tourism have filled the gap and more. From our admittedly limited perspective, Newfoundland has more in common with Alberta than with the rest of the Maritimes. (Then again, my view of the rest of the Maritimes may also be wrong.)

(Generally speaking one should always be wary of myths. A lot of people probably thought that New Orleans consisted of jazz music, Mardi Gras and trumpets, but the hurricane last week showed us that it was mostly a large poor American inner city waiting to unravel. I was not completely aware how pervasive this mythical view was until I started reading reports of the disaster in which the writers could not seem to disentangle themselves from the French Quarter and brass band funerals. This was ironic to me because my only knowledge about the city comes from the novels of James Lee Burke about the New Orleans area detective Dave Robicheaux. In his novels, Burke depicts a city permeated by organized crime, vicious gangs and endless violence. He may not be far wrong.)

One of the newspaper stories that caught my eye during our vacation was about the disappearance of rural countryside near St. John’s because of residential development. This is very reminiscent of the on-going green belt usage debate in Ottawa. (Or Toronto, for that matter, where it’s effectively a dead issue now since there is no green belt left. This leads me to ask Toronto, are you happy now that the green belt is gone? Did you get what you wanted? The developers did and they each bought themselves a beautiful country property on a lake somewhere with the money they made.) I understand the importance of housing and economic activity but do we really have to destroy every beautiful location in the country in order to build more suburbs? The news stories invariably report this as "pressure from developers”, a phrase that mystifies me. Does the city belong to the developers? Why are they making urban planning decisions? Who cares about their pressure? Remember that there are people in our society who would gladly cover the east face of the Rockies with advertising billboards if they could make a buck out of it. That doesn’t mean we should let them.

Europeans are discovering Newfoundland while most Canadians ignore it. Organized hiking tours of the East Coast Trail, complete with stays at participating B&B’s are popular with walkers from all over Europe. We met some from France, Germany and Britain. There is an up-market condo development being built near the Corner Brook ski hills, which is targeted directly at wealthy Europeans. They are selling from half a million dollars and up. St. John’s is busting at the seams with private art galleries, which I think is a leading indicator of either affluence or cheap rent. People don’t buy art for their walls unless the mortgage is paid and they have food for dinner. I do believe that the region has had recent bad times but given the many hardships that the people of Newfoundland have had to endure for centuries it is a measure of our own ignorance that we are surprised when they bounce back. You owe it to yourself to go visit and see.

Retailers R Us

2005-09-05T15:08:00.000-04:00

I timed it. It takes nearly half an hour for me to go my local food service superstore to get cream for my coffee. The bottleneck isn’t the drive there and back. I would prefer to walk but modern urban designers have decided that’s it better to put stores far away from where people live, that way their neighbourhoods are more family oriented. Why families benefit from spending more time in their cars has not been properly explained to me. No, what takes the most time to buy a half-pint of cream is the time I spend walking around in the store.

For some reason that only marketing professionals understand, food stores no longer just sell food. When I walk into my local name brand supermarket, I first come across a cafeteria style coffee shop, followed by two or three aisles of pharmaceuticals with condoms, toothpaste, deodorant and such, then two or three aisles of children’s clothes before I finally get to an area where there are some foodstuffs, although the shelves at this point mainly contain pet food and plastic wrap along with beans and jello. Then, I have to walk past 3 aisles of pots, pans, corkscrews and towels before getting back to food again, but there are three or four more aisles before I get to the dairy counter. Then I have to walk back.

Listen guys, I know that you are jealous of Wal-Mart because they sell tuna and chips but you are not going to beat them at their game by making it more difficult for me to pick up cream and bread from my grocery store. You used to have a really good market niche, food. Pretty much everybody buys food now and then. Why don’t you make it quicker and more convenient for me to buy food, then, since that’s your business?

In order to save time, I have started shopping for food at a local grocery chain that only carries fresh produce, dairy foods, a bakery and a butcher’s counter. They do have one aisle of dry goods with jams, some snack foods, pickles etc., but that’s it. And all of it is food. They don’t sell lawn chairs, depilation creams, or cold remedies. Or lube jobs. The store is small by modern standards so I don’t have to walk far but despite that they magically they have a wider variety of fruit and meats than the large chain supermarkets. And, they are usually less expensive. How can this be? I don’t know but maybe some of you marketing and sales executives should visit one and try to figure it out. They pay you enough so try to earn it.

So Sue Me

2005-09-04T18:00:00.000-04:00

I remember a news story many years ago about a guy somewhere in the U.S. who threw a party at his place, got drunk, climbed onto the roof of his house and dove into his pool. He miscalculated the lateral distance, as drunks are liable to do, and hit his head on the edge of the pool. I cannot remember whether he died or simply knocked himself into a permanent stupor but I do recall that his family sued the maker of the pool arguing that the pool’s edge was not adequately designed. It’s not the least bit obvious to me what design improvements would be needed to guard against drunks flying off rooftops or why it is even reasonable to expect that there could be any. But my general impression is that most people long ago gave up any hope that the legal system can meet the common sense test. The way I remember it, the drunk’s family won some money in the settlement.

I recently read that the survivors of the Air France flight 358 that skidded off the runway at Toronto’s Pearson airport in August have launched a class action lawsuit. Although all survived the crash and injuries were mostly minor, many of the passengers are claiming mental distress and want compensation. There appears to be controversy surrounding the suit with some claiming that it is simply a cash grab. It’s hard to argue against that point of view. On the other hand it’s equally hard to imagine a world without penalties for screwing up. Where would that lead? The line I try to draw in my mind in cases like that is whether the screw-up was due to foreseeable negligence or to circumstances beyond anyone’s control, like drunks skydiving off roofs.

I attended a wedding in Connecticut several years ago, a few months after the O.J. Simpson trial. My cousin is a lawyer and at one point the conversation turned toward the O.J. case and the kind of absurd lawsuit that occasionally surfaces. I asked whether or not I could sue someone because hearing about all these nutty court cases was depressing the hell out of me. She thought about it for a minute, speculating whether the media or the various legislatures could be held liable for my mental distress. Someone else then changed the subject but I noticed that she never really dismissed the idea.

The cynic in me says that it is not at all mysterious how these legal absurdities come to pass. Everyone in a courtroom is paid by the hour and they have no reason to dismiss any idea as too nutty nor do they have any incentive to bring cases to speedy conclusions. It brings a smile to my face where I hear about the backlog in the courts and what a problem this presents to jurisprudence. What baloney. If it really were a problem it would have been fixed long ago. Systems generally tend to evolve in ways that benefit someone and the main beneficiaries of clogged and time consuming courts are the people who control those same courts. That the system works the way it does is no surprise.

I came across a stunning (to me) example of accident compensation recently at the Titanic exhibit at the Geo-Science center in St. John’s, Newfoundland. It gives a detailed sequence of events that led to the sinking of the ship and it reminded me of the corporate hubris that led to the recent sinking of Nortel, Enron and WorldComm, among others. In short, a group of arrogant egomaniacs decided that they could do no wrong, which led to tragedy, mostly other people’s tragedies. That captain of American free enterprise, J.P Morgan, paid no compensation to the survivors of the Titanic. My, how times have changed. What’s more, he terminated the employment and stopped paying salaries to the surviving members of the crew beginning at 12:20 am that fateful day, about 5-10 minutes after the Titanic ducked under. I suppose that makes a certain kind of sense. Since there is no more boat, there is no point paying the crew. I guess they should have been thankful that he didn’t charge them a lifeboat rental fee.

Happily, corporate management has come such a long way since then. Those guys at Enron were only thinking of their staff’s well being when they obliged them to invest in company stock while unloading their own shares on the sly. When I read about some of the criminal cases against those senior executives I think that it is all well and good, but frankly, who gives a damn if the weasels spend a year or two playing golf at a minimum-security facility. To my mind the only priority should be to get the money back. To that end, there are lots of shareholder lawsuits in the works of course, but I am willing to bet that future historians will record that the main beneficiaries of those were the lawyers and courtroom staff.

More Crime Novels

2005-09-02T09:09:00.000-04:00

This is just a quick note to mention a couple of crime novelists whose detective heroes ply their trade in Yorkshire, England and Dublin, Ireland respectively. Besides the good stories, they also take you to places far from home.

Peter Robinson writes a crime series set in Yorkshire that features a detective named Alan Banks, now a Chief Inspector. There are over a dozen novels in the series and they span a decade or more in the life of Banks. Robinson has received numerous awards for his work and has lived in the Toronto area since the 1970’s.

The novels are top rate police procedurals. I have not yet read all the books in the series but in the ones I have read there are usually one or two crime-related story lines along with several side plots about the personal lives of Banks, his family, and his immediate subordinates. The plots are complex, with investigative dead ends, leaps of logic, dumb luck, and dogged footwork. Banks is thorough, suspicious of loose ends and not quick to judgment but he is not always correct either. He is not a reclusive loner but is shown working closely with his staff. Novels do not often accurately portray workplaces but the office scenes in these books seem authentic. In the last novel or two it was a special treat to have the accumulating criminal evidence revealed in the same haphazard order that I imagine occurs in real life. I could never quite see where the plot was headed but it was a pleasure to watch it unfold.

Banks’ personal life was thrown into turmoil when his wife left him in one novel and the ramifications of that breakup played out in several subsequent books. He complicates his own life by befriending female colleagues and some time is spent examining the effects of that on all their lives and the all too human difficulties that arise from the relationships. By and large the characters have reached middle age and nothing in their lives is simple anymore; they all have baggage. Amidst all that Banks is also shown as an eclectic music lover and it is fun reading about his record collection along with the troubles with his wife and lovers.

John Brady sets his novels about Inspector Matt Minogue in Ireland. He is an Inspector in the Dublin-based Garda Murder Squad. There are 6 or 7 books in this series and in the first book that I read Minogue had just returned from a lengthy convalescence after being injured in an Irish terrorist bombing. It was a dark introduction to the series and dark and brooding is how I would describe these novels. There are no major family problems in Minogue’s life but internal questions about his own middle age co-exist with his misgivings about Irish politics and the Celtic Tiger economic miracle that he watches develop around him. He appreciates the material good that the boom brings but he is not so sure about other changes that follow from it. The author spends a lot of time describing Irish society in both modern Dublin itself and the rural areas of west Ireland, where investigations sometimes lead Minogue. The social commentary does not intrude into the plots but rather is very compelling in its own right. The reader is vividly transported to a different place. The geography matters in these books.

As with Robinson’s Inspector Banks, Minogue is persistent and dogged, but is less happy about the bureaucracy above him in both his own force and in other security services. His public life is spent in a stark criminal reality, while his private life seems normal and placid in contrast. While he is deeply earnest about solving crimes, there is a melancholic undertone that Minogue may think that the exercise is futile. It is an odd sort of fatalism that follows from being good at what you do while not necessarily believing that it will serve any purpose in the long run. To him, the glass is often half empty.

Dark well-written brooding aside, however, Brady’s plots are dense, complex and come complete with action and thrills as well. It is an interesting mix because it’s difficult to imagine the Minogue character as an action hero but the author probably throws him into those situations precisely because it is so uncharacteristic.

The novels of both these authors are widely available either on store shelves or by special order and I have been able to find most of the early books in each series in second hand bookstores.

Vacation Hiatus

2005-08-28T15:31:00.000-04:00

This is just a note to regular readers, if there are any. We were away for two weeks on vacation during which I made no updates to this blog. Normal activity will resume shortly.

Job Reviews, Stars, and Planets

2005-08-10T22:35:00.000-04:00

This is a true story. I feel the need to preface with that because I wouldn’t blame readers if they thought I was making the whole thing up or at least exaggerating. But I’m not.

Years ago I knew someone who worked in Human Resources at a large Canadian company although it was so long ago that they may have still been calling it Personnel at the time. They had an accounting department manager that had been with them about a year. That firm conducted their annual employee performance reviews for their entire staff at the same time. A few weeks after the manager had completed his staff’s reviews some complaints began to find their way to the Personnel department.

Together with that manager’s boss, the Personnel department investigated. After questioning the employees in question they were astonished to discover that the manager had performed his staff’s appraisals based on their astrological signs. Specifically, he had written down the duties of each position along with the characteristics that would be required of the ideal candidate for each position. He then matched up this ideal with the astrological sign of the person that was currently performing that function and assigned performance appraisals based on the degree of the match. So that if, according to him, a position required an Aquarius and the current employee was an Aquarius, that employee received a positive review and a healthy salary increase. But if the person were a Leo, say, well that wouldn’t be very good and the poor Leo received a less than glorious review along with a more modest salary increase.

They confronted the manager about this and he unapologetically admitted to his actions. I suppose they tried to reason with him but must have given up because they fired him very soon after. By this time however, he was well past his probationary period and although they felt that he had been let go for just cause, they gave him a 4 to 6 week severance payment in lieu of notice, basically for humane reasons. This turned out to be a mistake because when he threatened to sue for unlawful dismissal, based on who knows what justification, the company’s lawyers informed Personnel that paying the severance had been a tactical error because a judge could choose to view that as an admission of partial culpability. He advised paying the guy even more money to make the entire matter go away arguing that it was less risky than ending up in open court in front of a judge. (It would have been interesting to find out what legal precedent might have been set if they had happened to appear before a judge who arrived at judgments guided by astrological charts.)

After the matter was settled Personnel called up the references that the manager had given during his interviews and asked some pointed questions. The references admitted that there had been problems with the guy and that he had launched unlawful dismissal suits against them as well as other employers that they had found out about, but that they had been reluctant to say so when called the first time. They probably feared getting sued.

Several years later at the end of a working day I was chatting with some colleagues and told them the story. Reactions were mostly chuckles and head-shakes but one fellow, a rather good software designer as I recall, stunned me by asking whether that manager had used a full or partial astrological chart when analyzing his staff’s abilities. At first I thought he was kidding but quickly figured out that he was quite serious. I was speechless.

In a version of Murphy’s Laws, one of the corollaries to the Laws is that “Things Can Always Get Worse.” If you are ever left shaking your head at work one day over what appears at the time to be an indescribably stupid act on the part of someone, maybe even your manager, remember this story and that corollary.

Erratum - Automotive Behaviour

2005-08-09T08:25:00.000-04:00

Referring to this previous blog entry I have been privately informed that it is in fact legal to perform U-turns at intersections under the Ontario Traffic Act. This came as quite a surprise to me although as I get older I may have to start getting used to remembering things incorrectly. It is possible that there are specific municipal by-laws that forbid the practice in some towns and cities however.

I think that allowing the practice is a mistake from a safety point of view. It strikes me as a rule that was introduced in a different time and place that was never revisited and that probably should be, given present day levels of traffic congestion. I don’t expect this to happen anytime soon though given the contradictions we live with every day. After all, we live in a society that claims to care about air quality and road safety but then permits the widespread personal recreational use of 3 ton SUV’s by drivers who never had to demonstrate the ability to drive a vehicle that large and heavy. We further compound this by allowing them to tow long heavy trailers without further driver training and testing. This is nuts, of course, but no worse than many other things.

Book Recommendations

2005-08-08T10:50:00.000-04:00

One of the things that I am really good at is reading fiction. While on my first job out of university I called in sick once in order to stay home and finish a novel (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré) that I had started the evening before. The first half kept me up till about 2:00 am and when I woke up late the next morning I simply had to finish it. That is not as unprofessional as it sounds because my work hours were all over the map anyway and I did eventually go into work late that afternoon.

For the last decade or so, my favourite fictional form is the police procedural. I don’t enjoy unrealistic locked room mysteries that are solved by an omniscient Sherlock Holmes clone, complete with a dullard sidekick. I want to read a novel about believable characters that just happen to get involved in crime, not a showpiece for plot twists. I prefer that the main characters, whether police or their stand-ins, have real lives with real problems living in places that you learn something about. From time to time on this blog I will write about what I have read and liked. It would be an overstatement to call these book reviews.

A Canadian author, Giles Blunt, has begun an excellent series based on a detective named John Cardinal working in Algonquin Bay, Ontario, which is really North Bay in disguise. Cardinal has a number of personal problems, which he does not always deal with very well, but is tenacious at his job, which in turn causes him some grief with his superiors. At various times he has run-ins with the OPP (Provincial Police), the RCMP (federal police) and even CSIS (federal security services). So far, there are 3 books in the Cardinal series, in order: Forty Words For Sorrow; Delicate Storm; and the recently released Black Fly Season.

I won’t give away any details about Cardinal’s personal woes because discovering what they are is an integral part of the first novel in the series, Forty Words For Sorrow. Their unfolding happens alongside the novel’s murder investigation. This site gives plot summaries of Blunt’s novels. I can tell you that what one learns about his problems left me conflicted. I wanted to root for the guy because of what he had lived through but at the same time wondered whether or not he really is such a decent person. It is an all too human situation and there is no Hollywood style happy ending.

What remains especially vivid in my mind from the first book is some of the descriptive prose, something that does not often affect me. The plot is first rate, believable, tense and frightening, but his descriptions of the bitterly low temperatures during a Northern Ontario winter cold snap can make you shiver. Cold is usually used as a peripheral plot device but in this story its presence is the central condition of everyday life. It’s not easy to write about weather without becoming clichéd.

His second novel, Delicate Storm, stirred some memories. Part of the plot involves some characters at the periphery of the 1970 October crisis in Quebec. I was living in Montreal then, attending university, and can remember the army units temporarily stationed on Mount Royal. I also knew a classmate who had had several relatives detained by the authorities. In this second novel, a francophone female OPP detective Delorme that was introduced in the first novel is more fully developed. Using this character permits some uniquely Canadian social commentary as it enables the author to introduce some francophone elements in his stories, even if only in a tangential way. I suspect that a lot of readers in southern Ontario may not fully appreciate the francophone influence in a lot of Northern Ontario. This connection dates back to the fur trade and a quick look at a map of the area’s river systems show very clearly why it developed. Automobiles and modern highways can sometimes obscure what used to be obvious relationships between communities.

Blunt has released the third novel in the series, Black Fly Season, which I have not read yet but will do so soon. The title sounds as if he may be using another cruel and annoying aspect of our northern environment for effect. The previous novels are still in print and are widely available.

Appreciating Art

2005-08-04T22:05:00.000-04:00

I do not know much about art. But I know what I like.

Like a lot of North Americans of my generation I have received little or no formal instruction in the visual arts. At my high school I attended only one semester of art class and that was in grade eight. I do not recall any discussions of art history or artistic styles and I know we never visited any galleries or museums. The classroom sessions were fun for those among us who had natural talent but all I remember is frustration. I can see what is in front of me but there is disconnect between that and my fingers’ ability to draw what I see. My brain simply does not know where to begin. I do not know if even a rudimentary ability to draw can be taught. But visual imagery must interest me because I have developed a lifelong interest in photography.

Several months ago the National Gallery here in Ottawa unveiled a new acquisition. It is a 9 meter tall, 6000 kg bronze sculpture of a spider. You may have seen it on the news because it cost the Gallery $3.2 million and art is only ever mentioned on television when it costs a lot. It took several years to build and is the work of a well-known Franco-American sculptor, Louise Bourgeois. It is called Maman and is a female spider with some eggs in a pouch in its underbelly. The sculpture was placed near the front doors of the Gallery and dominates the plaza there. You can see it in the accompanying photo that I took early this morning.

Because of the price the Gallery paid and because of its subject matter, it is tempting to want to make fun of this purchase. It is not the least bit obvious to me what connection there is between a female spider and this gallery, or this city, or this country but I accept that a museum’s purchases do not necessarily have to relate in that manner. All the same, I cannot say that my soul is stirred in any deep way when I look at it. On the other hand, it is far more appealing than a statue of some politician. (While I am on the subject I would like to advocate a rule that would prohibit displaying statues of politicians until they have been dead at least 50 years. It takes that long or more before history can determine whether they are worth remembering, let alone celebrating.)

Although I am not stirred by the sculpture, I have to admit that it is damn neat to look at. When examined up close it is obviously a fine piece of work. I know nothing about sculpting in bronze, or in anything else, but when I look at it I can sense that it is very finely crafted and I am certain that it was difficult to make. It is possible that my opinion is utterly worthless to anyone other than myself of course, but that is pretty much the way I feel about anyone’s opinion about art. Its worth is completely subjective.

In my own mind I informally categorize art into the following groups: 1) worthless crap; 2) con job; 3) don’t like it; 4) like it; 5) might buy it if I had the money; and finally, 6) I will buy it. So far, nothing has made it into category 6 but that may be because I am a cheapskate and fate has conspired to keep me income free for a while. Besides that, my wife’s art covers our walls at home and I feel no need to buy anyone else’s.

To expand a bit, an example of something in category 1) would be anything that I drew, or something that your three year old made. Good examples of category 2) can be found in the modern art sections of museums and art galleries. Category 2) pieces are the kinds of work that you stare at for a while, maybe admit that it would be worth paying some guy $20 an hour to paint it on an office building lobby’s wall to give some relief from the gray concrete, but that it would never occur to you to call ART. It might make a nice mural, maybe, but that is about it. Does it really take much talent to paint a few stripes? Do the stripes really mean anything important? When it comes to modern art, Tom Wolfe said it best in The Painted Word, which is still in print, and I cannot improve on him. I highly recommend his book.

Categories 3) and 4) are self-evident. Category 5) is a tough one. Would I spend 3 million big ones on a spider sculpture? Well, no, but I would not spend $3 million on anything. What if I won $10 million in a lottery? Well, not then either actually. Blowing 30% of my net worth on one sculpture is a little extravagant. But what if I was worth 100 billion dollars, had a big courtyard to fill in front of my mansion and had a relative with arachnophobia whose visits I wanted to avoid? All of us have lived enough of life to know that when circumstances change, well, circumstances change and what seemed ridiculous yesterday is normal today. There was a time in my life when I did not think that it was important to have air conditioning in my car. Can you imagine that? It would be stupid to try and predict how I would behave if I had 100 billion dollars.

Is it appropriate for a public body like the National Gallery to spend vast sums of money on works of art? It is tempting to say no but we did hire experts to run the place and we have to trust them to do their job. If they disappoint us off too often we can always fire them.

In the bigger picture I think we should take the realistic attitude that $3.2 million really is not much money. Sure, it would make a great pay cheque for most of us but the Gomery inquiry racked up $80 million in costs to study a $100 million political scandal (assuming that it actually turns out to be a scandal.) In the face of that and who knows what else that we do not know about, buying the spider is not that big a deal. On the other hand, the Gallery was said to have used one third of its yearly budget to buy this one piece and I cannot help but wonder what other purchases they had to pass up in order to secure the spider. Reports at the time stated that several institutions were competing for Maman so there may have been a bidding war.

It might be helpful to place ourselves in the artist’s shoes for a moment though. For all we know she spent 60 years of her life in poverty and had to pay 50 % commission to her agent on this sale. Her take home may only amount to minimum wage. Compare her to a NHL player, a Nortel executive, or an empty-headed entertainment celebrity. I do not begrudge her the money at all.

Why Men Talk Sports

2005-08-04T09:59:00.000-04:00

This is intended primarily for women who are bewildered about why men talk for hours on end about sports and sports trivia. I am not especially afflicted by this myself, I don’t believe, but have often been in the company of guys that are. Many men are able to interminably relive and discuss seemingly unimportant moments of either their own athletic past or events in professional sports that they have witnessed.

(I am sure we all remember seeing B war movies where a soldier’s friendliness was tested by whether or not he knew who pitched an obscure World Series game. However I don’t think that men talk sports as a way to train for war.)

It’s not immaturity. It’s not that boys will be boys. It’s not because when a bunch of guys get together they feel that the responsibilities of adulthood can be set aside because their wives or girlfriends aren’t around so that they feel free to discuss childish things. I concede that it may be partly that but groups of women together can be equally obnoxious when their men are not around. I have been in restaurants and have heard them at the other tables. The absence of supervising females doesn’t explain the fascination with sports discussions, in my opinion.

I think I understand what’s going on. When people engage in a discussion of something important, such as middle-east politics or global economic policies, it is incumbent on the participants to back up their points of view with some knowledge of the subject matter. It is not necessary to be correct in every detail or to provide extensive bibliographies to back up every opinion but you have to sound as if you know what you’re talking about in order to be taken seriously. Your reasoning must be cogent. Your opinions must follow logically from relevant facts. It’s not enough to say, “All politicians are crooks.” You have to provide some evidence.

But imagine a couple of guys having a debate about who was the best CFL quarterback of all time, which is a good example of one of those unanswerable questions that routinely come up in sports. One of them might say that it was obviously Russ Jackson. The other might say that, no, it was Ron Lancaster. They will use half-remembered statistics or invent some new ones, or refer to a particularly memorable performance in a famous game to back up their claims. But in the middle of all that, one might say, “What do you know, you’re from Mississauga?” (I do not mean to pick on Mississauga but merely used it as an example.) A person’s home address is utterly irrelevant to the discussion and would be entirely inappropriate if they were debating third world debt. But in a nonsensical argument about sports, it is a perfectly valid debating point. Actually, it’s a pretty good one. And therein lies the beauty of talking sports. You don’t have to think very hard. You don’t have to behave by the rules. None of it matters.